


Terminal Velocity

by Letterblade



Series: Exiles [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Child Murder, Extremis Pepper Potts, Gen, Hydra Obadiah Stane, Journey to the Center of the Mind, Medical Trauma, Minor Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Narrowly Avoided Alcoholic Relapse, Negative Media Coverage, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Destruction, Shadowy Conspiracy is Shadowy, The Mindscape, Tony Stark Cannot Handle Nice Things, Torture, discussion of suicide, watchdogs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-11
Updated: 2016-10-02
Packaged: 2018-06-07 21:00:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 52,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6823951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Letterblade/pseuds/Letterblade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark fucks it up. Tony Stark tries to fix it. Rinse. Repeat. Either way, he keeps falling, bits and pieces torn away in the wind, and one of these days, he's going to crash, unless somebody manages to catch him. Or, Tony makes good life choices after Civil War and has to relearn how to be himself. Again. While struggling with his own decisions, Bucky Barnes' brain, and General Ross' sketchiness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Beta credit to Mllelaurel.
> 
> This is going to be a genfic of indeterminate length (I have a few possible stopping points and will lean towards wrapping it up early if I'm losing steam, rather than committing yet another unfinished WIP.) Varying numbers of side stories in the same continuity may also happen, may be shipfic, and can be found in the series this is a part of.
> 
> Eight years ago, my last time around in this fandom, writing Civil War fix-its was a lot of my Marvelfic interest. I guess that hasn't changed.

Tony can feel it when the Raft starts to submerge. Not quite hear it, not this far from the hull, but the roar of those great pumps runs deep through the superstructure of the place, gets amplified by one _slightly_ loose bolt at the base of his chair, and vibrates through the metal bars locked across his face.

It doesn’t sink fast enough for him to feel that. Just the vibrations. The tone darkening slightly. Rush of water peaking. Then silence.

Tony stares wide-eyed up at one spot where the wall meets the ceiling the whole time. His vision’s darkening round the edges. He can’t breathe. His hands are making claws and fists and claws again in their two-inch thick metal cuffs, and this is overkill, this is ridiculous fucking overkill, he’s not like Wanda, they could’ve just stuck him in a cell without his suit like Clint or the rest, not locked him into some overdesigned medical fetish chair with even his _skull_ immobilized. Like the rough-built, overdesigned Mark VII, loaded for Chitauri bear, servos so strong that he could barely move when the power went out. Frozen on his back on a broken street in midtown.

Nobody won this time.

He can move, oh, about his toes and his hands. His eyes. They haven’t gagged him, but he can’t really pry his jaw open enough to speak with the chin bar locked in place. Not exactly conducive to breathing through one of those goddamn freakouts of his. No, it just keeps going.

It’s actually almost a relief when a couple of guys in scrubs and facemasks come in and the needle bites into his arm.

 

* * *

 

_He sent Pepper some flowers. Stared twenty minutes at the blank text box on the order form. Typed. Backspaced. Typed. Don’t worry her. Leave her space. “Good luck with all your stuff” was about the best he could manage, and then he squeezed his eyes shut and let Friday do the rest. Typical._

 

* * *

 

He’s hazed. He’s not under. That just kind of, honestly, pisses him off. Heart rate sluggish as he spasms against the straps digging into his back. He can still feel the panic gnawing at his belly, but without his lungs getting in on the action, it feels glassy, distant. He’d prefer the alternative.

There’s some terrible mechanical buzz, and he grunts through clenched teeth. Torture. Okay. Sure. He’s done torture. Right? But it’s nothing except the vibration of an electric razor against his skull, gloved hands carelessly pulling shorn hair off naked strips of skin. Come on, guys. Shaved just isn’t my look, there’s a reason there’s no photos of me junior year. Mangled murmurs through his immobilized mouth.

 

* * *

 

_He wasn’t going anywhere until he got the walking exoskeleton perfected, of course. And interfaced with War Machine’s systems. And the specs tossed offhand to one of the charity branch project managers. New solution for paralysis, under development by Stark Industries, open source for the 3D printing crowd. The media was still too busy replaying footage from Sokovia to give a fuck. And they haven’t even caught on who’d built Ultron._

_There’d never been a gulf like this between him and Rhodey, tension like this. It terrified him. He tweaked one final servo on his knee, then War Machine’s knee, and didn’t say a word. His order. His bad. Fix it and run. Rhodey’s in his own weird legal space after all. US military, not an Avenger. He’s out of reach of the UN council. In reach of Ross, maybe, but at least not directly now that the guy’s retired. Tony warned Rhodey not to trust the two-faced bastard. Gave a shrug and a see-you-around when Rhodey got cleared for duty._

_Once Rhodey was in Washington, it was easier to melt away without saying goodbye. Rhodey’s best friend had been that kid back at MIT, after all. Not the guy who’d gotten his spine broken. Not—whatever he’d become._

 

* * *

 

The electrode gel is cold on Tony’s fresh-bared scalp, and doesn’t smell of anything at all. There’s beeping somewhere behind him. He stares at the gently swirling line where ceiling meets wall, the occasional impassive body passing in front of him. He’s tired of panic. Literally tired out, that’s really the only reason he’s breathing slow, limp in his restraints. Can only sort of make out what they’re saying.

See how he reacts to these tests under drug induction. What if we think he _is_ paranormal? I mean, these things don’t just happen. Sure, but the kid grew up around pretty much everything SHIELD had kicking around at the time. You seriously don’t think Howard Stark experimented on his own kid. Doesn’t matter, we just need to know. If he’s off the charts, we open up his skull, take a live look at his brain. Don’t remove anything yet. Only if there’s something special we can use.

Exhaustion turns to ice, and Tony starts screaming through his locked teeth, screaming and screaming. It’s some strangled, animal noise.

Nobody cares.

 

* * *

 

_Vision put the most effort into holding him up, which surprised him, honestly. He didn’t know the weird red bastard gave enough of a damn._

_“I cannot let you do this alone.”_

_“What, go for a stroll? You don’t even know what I’m doing.”_

_There was the slightest tilt of his inscrutable head. “You’ve been investigating Ross and the Raft and the back end of the UN Council for some time. I can only guess you’re planning to dig deeper.”_

_“Oh, look at you, playing politics now.”_

_“I am only trying to better see the shape of things. Given…everything that has happened.” Oh, look, he sounded almost humble. “But I know you do not easily let go of fixing that which you believe to be your fault.”_

_Tony gritted his teeth against a bark of denial. Vision wasn’t Jarvis. Jarvis was gone. Wasn’t fucking fair that he still knew him as well as Jarvis had, Jarvis’ scattered data woven into whatever passed for his mind. Usually he at least had the good grace to not rub it in his face. “Well, I smell a lot of pretty sizable rats and Captain Wonderpants hasn’t swooped in out of nowhere to punch all our problems away, so let me go deal with it.”_

_“It is futile, to go this far by yourself.” Said so mildly, like it was obvious fact._

_Tony wheeled and jabbed a finger into his chest. “So tell me, mister shape-of-things, is anything we ever do not futile? Is there even a point? Or are we all just fucking around waiting to die so why would you care?”_

_For a moment, he could almost read him like he was a normal person, instead of some impassive, jeweled mask. Eyes widening. Then closing. A silence as sharp-edged as pleading the fifth._

_“You wanna help me out, you stay right the hell here. Last official Avenger, you should get a special t-shirt. Council’s gonna get pissier faster if they don’t have someone to shove around. And if they hear about something we’re needed for sooner than a bunch of losers on the run do, at least you’ll be there to deal with it.”_

_“I have my own protocols,” Vision said, almost gently. But he did not raise his hand._

_“Sure. You do what you gotta do. Worthy to rule Asgard my shiny metal ass.” Tony turned, stalked halfway to the door, turned back. Fidgeted with one of his backup drives in his pocket. Flipped it out and tossed it to the Vision, who caught it with stupidly perfect grace. “Throw that at His Royal Catsuit someday if you want to feel useful. Quietly.”_

_“Stark,” Vision said, when he was almost out the door. Just an edge of urgency that made him wonder if he was going to throw down. “Tony,” he added, eventually, when he didn’t turn, and that was a jolt down his spine, some wrench behind the scars on Tony’s chest that he didn’t know what to make of._

_He turned._

_“Please be careful,” Vision said, with great, almost tender care._

_“Yeah, yeah, I’ll have fun storming the castle.”_

 

* * *

 

There’s a surgical tray with a bonesaw just in Tony’s peripheral vision, if he rolls his eyes so far to the side that the sockets ache, and he can’t stop looking at it. Brains don’t have nerve endings, but the weirdest shit happens when you stick wires into a naked cerebrum. The weirdest. He’d seen the youtube videos. How the hell are they going to tell if he has paranormal intelligence anyway? How the hell would he even _have_ paranormal intelligence? Paranormal ability to fuck shit up, sure, but no way his father could have…

His father. His father. Some new round of drugs goes into his arm, and there’s this long, horrible period where he can’t see the wall anymore, and there’s a hole in the stars, and a car skids into a tree on grainy video tape, over and over and over and over. Barnes staring into space as he throttled her without even looking at her. Somebody mutters that he’ll choke if he throws up. Needle. Stabilize the induction so we can record instinctive reactions.

There are footsteps somewhere, and thuds, and he’s pretty sure he’s hallucinating, that’s just the thud of a metal fist into an old man’s jaw in staticky mono. He doesn’t know who’s screaming. Could be him.

Six feet and change of solid crew-cut muscle arcs across a hole in space.

The noise of a fight is distant. One gunshot. A hard crack. Surgical tray goes toppling with a crash, and Tony makes some duck pout against the chin rest, why hadn’t _he_ gotten to knock it over. He isn’t sure what’s real right now, but this—this has got to be some hallucination. No way _he’d_ be here, looking pale in commando black, pillow lips swimming somewhere in Tony’s vision as he taps his earpiece.

“Room’s secure. Looks like he’s drugged, I’m going to have my hands full getting him to you, Clint.”

Static. Tony’s eyes flick from side to side wildly. Animal noises in the back of his throat. Bulky shoulders in black, crouched nearby, fiddling. Something clicks, and Tony doesn’t realize his arms are free until his clenched muscles yank his own fist up to his shoulder.

“Okay, waiting on you, Natasha. Easy. Easy, Stark. Tony. You’re safe now.”

Rattles and clicks. The chinrest loosens, then the rest of the head cage, and Tony’s mouth jolts open on one raw scream, and then he swallows it. No way this is real. No way he’s giving Rogers this kind of ammunition. His hands are numb, shaking. He paws at his scalp, dragging electrodes off with little spots of tape burn, gags.

Two thick arms pull him up from behind, lifting him off the chair with his back pressed against the broad expanse of his chest, and suddenly it starts feeling a little too real. He can smell him, the way he smells ridiculously sunny-fresh even after a fight, feel the heat boiling off his skin. Those particular short, almost disciplined pants as he wrangles him upright. Fuck. Just when he thought things couldn’t get any stupider, here he is getting  _rescued_.

Tony’s legs are jelly. There’s another, much smaller black blur nearby. Rogers huffs and drags him back up. The smaller blur reloads her gun lazily and waves at the door. “Good evening, Mr. Stark,” she drawls. “Path’s clear. Two minutes until the security system comes back on.”

“Plenty of time,” Rogers says, and shrugs, and somehow, with that shrug, Tony isn’t on the ground anymore.

Two minutes feels like two years, and somewhere in there Tony slips into something closer to passing out, except it’s a long blurry dream where every corner they turn, he expects Barnes to be standing there, clinging to Rogers' shadow, staring over the roof of a car.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this chapter took a while, mostly because I was writing ahead. Things should come faster now that I have a better idea of where the fic's going. Blah blah blah so much plot chatter. I apologize if my Wakanda details are poor, I'm unfamiliar with that corner of comics canon so I'm just asspulling.

Tony’s very warm, and there’s sun in his face, and when he manages to make his lungs draw a full breath, it smells like one layer of high-tech air conditioning over something rich and heady and green.

_Good morning. It’s seven am. The weather in Malibu is eighty-one degrees with clear skies. The surf conditions are poor, high tide will be 1:24 pm…_

He can’t smell the sea.

Floor to ceiling windows brightening one by one over the Pacific. Helicopters. Concrete cracking, sliding down the cliff…

He can’t smell the sea, and dread gnaws at his gut, and he pries his eyes open.

The ceiling is something white and clinical and unfamiliar, and the murmurs in the background are in some language he can’t even begin to understand, and when he lolls his head to one side, the view doesn’t drop into the Pacific, but into a vast and steaming tract of jungle.

Tony’s never realized how much he misses the old house before.

He grumbles something around a very thick tongue, and sits upright with a thrashing of sheets, and takes stock. Hungry. Thirsty. Pounding headache and something like a hangover. Somebody’d gotten rid of the rest of the electrode gel and tape on his head, but he’s still in the same prison blues over long johns—a boon when you’re buried in the icy waters of the North Atlantic, a little too warm here. A few black guys in lab coats look at him, exchange glances, go back to work. They’re on the other side of a glass wall. So’s most of the room. Hospital, lab, he can’t quite tell. Feels his heart beating double-time against his chest.

“So that’s how it is,” Tony mutters vaguely. He kicks off his sheet and stands to prove that he can, wobbles be damned. Scratches his stubbly scalp, his intact beard. Paces his glass box. Crazy to think he’s in Wakanda, but where else could this be? His Royal Catsuit doesn’t _seem_ like the brain-dissection sort, at least?

He hadn’t expected it to end here.

Well. He hadn’t thought about how he’d expected it to end. Only known that he had to do _something_.

There’s a near-silent hiss of door sliding open and closed, and lo, enter His Royal Catsuit. Sans catsuit. Rogers at his side, the two of them chatting comfortably. Split lip and a heavy bruise on one side of Rogers’ face, only a little faded. Tony can’t have been out too long then, he supposes.

“Well, here I thought Wakanda was still dedicated to the accords. Consorting with fugitives, your majesty, can’t imagine this sitting well with the council.”

T’Challa, of course, is too damn self-contained to give more than a mild ghost of a smile. “I’d assumed you were aware, Mr. Stark. Why else have the Vision pass your research to me?”

“Sure, and I hope he did it under the table. _Somebody’s_ gonna try to kick over your rock one day.”

T’Challa shrugs. Rogers is a monolith next to him, hands folded in front of him in the receiving-a-briefing pose. “Most were not in Siberia,” T’Challa says. “Most don’t have your awareness of the situation. Unless you’ve done something to change that.”

“Hey, I’ve been working on your side these days. More or less. In case that wasn’t clear.” Tony’s pacing, talking with his hands. He feels frazzled, distant. He _hopes_ all the drugs are out of his system, but how the fuck would he know? “I’m trying to figure out if this is a cell, help me out here. I mean, scientific assessment. I hear you’re big on that here.”

“That depends very much on your actions,” T’Challa says, with immense patience. “Given that you attacked Captain Rogers during the flight here…”

“Uh,” Rogers says stiffly, “that’s not…”

“Attacked…?” Tony blinks, cocks his head. Not that punching perfect teeth etc. isn’t still tempting, but he’d been on his face, right?

“You were drugged, you split my lip. It’s not exactly the biggest problem we have.” Rogers looks awkward enough that Tony was pretty sure he hadn’t even told T’Challa about it.

“Who tattled,” Tony mumbles. “Romanoff or Barton. Gotta be Barton.”

T’Challa, in return, gives Rogers a brief, opaque look before turning back to Tony. Goddammit. They’ve been working together, all right. They’ve already got that stupid communicating in glances shit that Rogers has with all his friends. Tony sighs, leans his elbow on the glass, bows his head, chews his lip, scuffs his feet, and looks back up at them, all before T’Challa sighs and moves closer, footsteps silent.

“I appreciate receiving your data, Mr. Stark. I appreciate that you’re not working against us. But I don’t know what you were trying to accomplish by striking out alone against an international force specifically arranged to deal with men and women like ourselves. You could have contacted us.”

There’s a weight in the man’s voice, a cant to his eyebrows, which makes Tony feel obscurely like he’s being scolded, but he can’t even tell about what. “Hey, even I know when to butt out sometimes.”

Tony catches Rogers’ face for a moment, and then Rogers drops his gaze. Straight up drops it, like he’s ashamed of something.

“Your armor is not here,” T’Challa continues. “Not that I’d underestimate you without it.”

Oh, fuck-a-doodle-do. Tony jolts like he’s been punched in the gut, feels blood drain from his face. “Wait. It was with me when I— _Ross_ still has it?”

“It wasn’t on the Raft,” Rogers says, brow furrowing. “Not anywhere obvious, at least.” He laughs a short, entirely humorless laugh. “Two times I’ve broken into that place, and I’m still not sure what else they’re hiding.”

“Perhaps if you make it a third, you should bring a larger team,” T’Challa says neutrally. Tony’s only half paying attention. He’s pacing, muttering under his breath. Mostly fuck.

“We’ve got to get that back,” he snaps, turning to jab his finger into the glass. “They can’t get anything useful by cutting up my brain, the suit’s what matters.”

“Ross is the secretary of state,” Rogers says, sounding a touch taken aback. “Former military. Wouldn’t he have access to War Machine’s specs if he wanted to rip off your armor?”

“Not without tripping a lot of flags. He _could_ try to impound War Machine, but it’ll be a lot easier if he’s just got Iron Man in a closet somewhere. You think I didn’t have my legal department whip up an airtight contract for that shit? Rhodey’s suit’s been in the most secure part of my workshop until it went back to him. Needed modifications anyway.” His throat feels tight. He jams a hand against the glass to stop it from shaking. “No. Ironmongers. Get that tech. Ever again.”

T’Challa’s got one of those looks that makes Tony feel like he doesn’t need a bonesaw to go through his brain. When did that kid grow up? Hell. Tony grits his teeth and doesn’t squirm, and then there’s another goddamn telepathic exchange with Rogers, then Rogers draws himself up and refolds his hands. “We’ll make it a priority, then. If anyone can dig it up, it’s Natasha.” He pauses, the silence thick, then adds, almost gently, “How’s Rhodey doing?”

Tony whips off the glass, turns his back on them, and stares out the window. Wakanda looks like someone’s grown a glittering glass-and-steel crystal right in the untouched jungle. Trees as big as houses, cascading waterfalls, picturesque as fuck. He feels like he’s staring at the cover of some utopian sci-fi novel, not reality. Could just as well be a pterodactyl wheeling in the sky. He feels sick.

“Back on active duty,” he mutters finally. “He wouldn’t have it any other way. Walking exoskeleton’s the best it’ll be until the next generation of neural interfaces rolls around. Modifying the armor was the easy part, really. He’ll be a bit slower in ground engagements, but it doesn’t change a thing in the air.”

“I’m glad he’s doing better,” Rogers says, then, after a moment, “And I’m glad you could help him.”

“Like hell you—” Tony turns on his bare heel, takes two steps forward—and then one more step than he expected to, because the glass door isn’t there anymore.

T’Challa moves his hand from the control panel to Tony’s right wrist with neither sound nor warning, and Tony feels his eyes widen in alarm, one strangled sound in the back of his throat, and before he can do anything else, there’s a slim bronzed band snapping around his wrist with a subtle click. And they’re both _looking_ at him.

“Warn a fellow,” Tony mutters, retrieving his hand and tugging at the bracelet. He can’t even see the joint anymore. “Jesus.”

“It is a tracker, Mr. Stark,” T’Challa says. “There are places here you will not be allowed to see, and I would advise against making contact with the outside world or leaving at the moment. Please take some time to think about your next move.”

“I always think,” Tony grumbles, and gives it a final twist and tug. At least it’s stylish. Rogers isn’t wearing one, he notes—but of course he isn’t, everybody trusts _him_. T’Challa’s wearing something that looks about two steps beyond an iWatch, which is beeping very subtly. He checks it, sighs.

“I have two minutes. Steven, I’ll have to impose on you to show him around.”

 _Steven_. Yikes.

“Of course,” Rogers says, like it’s nothing, like it isn’t terrifically awkward. “You _can_ call me Steve, you know.”

“I can,” T’Challa says, _almost_ mischievous.

“Okay, cute, I’m sure you enjoy jerking me around, but seriously, am I or am I not a prisoner?” Tony manages to not scratch at the tracker for almost five seconds, he’s proud of himself.

T’Challa turns and gives him another round of that studious gaze. “You are not, Mr. Stark. On the one hand: please understand that I have taken a risk by allowing Captain Rogers to bring you here. Not just a personal risk, but a risk to Wakanda. I can only ask that you forgive my precautions, and understand that if you bring danger to this country, or to those under my royal protection, including Captain Rogers and Mr. Barnes, I will have to take action.”

“Right, of course the boyfriend’s here,” Tony mutters. It sinks like a cold weight in his gut. _Barnes_. Why could nothing ever be simple?

“On the other hand,” T’Challa continues, unruffled, “as I said, I appreciate the actions you took, and the great personal risk, and I would be profoundly grateful to continue working with you in this direction, if that would be your wish. The shape of the situation troubles me deeply, but I am not well placed to dig, only to hide those that do. I must play the moderate anchor to the council, to balance Ross, and pretend I have no personal investment beyond Wakanda’s interests and my father’s memory.” There’s an edge of very human frustration to his voice, and Tony almost revels in it—he didn’t think it’d be possible for someone to be _more_ obnoxious than Rogers. “It is your choice whether to ally with us, Mr. Stark, but I hope you do, and in the meantime, I wish to provide you a place to lay low and rest after your ordeal.”

“Okay,” Tony says slowly. That was—actually almost nice of him, it’s confusing. “Okay, well, mostly right now I want a goddamn burger, does that count as resting?”

“Sure, I’ll show you the kitchen,” says Rogers.

T’Challa’s watch beeps again.

“Twenty seconds,” he murmurs. “Please make yourself at home, Mr. Stark. I look forward to speaking more when we are ready.”

With that, he’s out, footsteps silent, and the door to the lab slides open on a tall, steely-eyed, drop-dead-gorgeous Wakandan woman who falls into step with him. It is, he’s gathering, good to be the king.

Barnes. _Barnes_. Tony feels _more_ disoriented than he did five minutes ago, and he’s starting to fall into that kind of headache where his skull feels like dried wood with his brain rattling around in it.

Rogers takes a deep breath, lets it out, tries another one, and he sounds almost—awkward. Strange thought. “Tony,” he says, carefully, as if prompting.

“Burger first,” he says, throat dry, because at least he’s got a plan of attack on that one.

 

* * *

 

The “kitchen” turns out to be a cross between a giant and incredibly classy cafeteria and T’Challa’s garrison of personal chefs, and navigating it all and obtaining food is enough of an adventure that it _almost_ distracts Tony from Rogers looming awkwardly in his wake. He finally emerges with something like a burger, as well as samples of about five different other things and three kinds of fruit that got pushed on him by the lively crowd. It’s midafternoon, he’s gathering, and the place is two-thirds-empty, and the cooks are simmering giant kettles for dinner and relatively bored.

Rogers obtains his own something-like-a-burger, along with six kinds of fruit, and they wander out to claim one of the countless round white tables that dot the room, and twenty feet out, the noise of the kitchen dims. The place is huge, but on a quick scan of the ceiling, Tony can spot the little white-noise speakers, the carefully canted panels of vivid geometric drapery and stiffer things, that damp the noise from deafening-school-cafeteria to classy-restaurant, even in a space this cavernous. It’s one of the better pieces of sonic engineering he’s seen, and okay, as far as places he’s been held maybe-not-prisoner, he has to admit Wakanda’s pretty cool.

The burger’s off-spec but delicious, and four of the five different other things blow the top of his head off and make him feel slightly alive and are also delicious, and he stews grinning in his own sweat and scorched throat as Rogers sympathetically points out which fruit kills the burn and fills him in on where they are. Wakanda’s capital, the big house: a traditional understatement for the two parts federal offices and one part research lab arcology that fills some vaguely-defined portion of the city. T’Challa, being king of one of the richest countries in the world, is of course the sort of person who can just toss an empty wing at a bunch of fugitives who need to lay low. And has arcologies. Tony’s already pretty sure he’s going to waste a chunk of time running around seeing _exactly_ how much he’s allowed to see.

Distractions.

The conversation _almost_ feels normal, even though it’s Rogers, all healed up like Tony had never almost killed him, leaning back in his chair munching on strange fruit number six and being so incredibly _civilized_ , but of course that can’t last. It’s Tony asking the how-the-hell-did-you-find-me-anyway question that breaks it.

“Well, Nat’s been trying to slip strings into Ross’ business and the back end of the council for a while now, and none of us could believe it when you were declared dead. Not without a body. So—”

“Wait, wait, hold up.” Tony feels like his blood has turned to ice. “ _What_.”

“You didn’t—” Rogers stops himself from stating the obvious, and bows his head a little, radiating sympathy. “I’m sorry. I thought you knew.”

Tony feels like the wind’s been punched out of him. Scrubs his hands over his face, drags them back—no hair, nothing but rough stubble under his palms. “Jesus,” he whispers. “Pepper.” He’s stock-still for a few panting breaths, with his gut turning flip-flops like he’s in freefall. “What—what exactly got released.”

Rogers takes a deep breath, steadying. “The strike team attached to the council, the one that enforces the accords and is pretty much under Ross’ command, put in a false report through the standard channels, saying you were killed in action by high-grade conventional weapons while operating in violation of the accords. It got picked up by the media from there. They had a verbal report, enough blurry photos to make it believable, but they were all in the armor, they could’ve been staged easily enough. And a death certificate. Nat’s pretty sure somebody leaned on the press not to question it.”

Tony’s mouth feels bone-dry. “Operating in violation of the accords. Oh, they must be having a field day with that.”

“Apparently there are some folks pushing to retire the Avengers entirely. Vision is…being Vision at them, I’m not sure how much it’s helping, but he’s still active, so it can’t be too bad.”

“Well, I left him behind for a reason, he’s all saintly and shit,” Tony mutters. He feels like his brain’s going in circles. “Is there a push for accountability in the other direction? How much do people care that the council task force killed Tony Stark?”

“Some. The report says you flew into what was supposed to be a warning shot while disobeying an order to stand down, and it was a freak bad hit that shorted out your suit, so they covered their asses on that front. I know T’Challa’s pushing hard, though.”

“I thought he wasn’t on the council himself, how much can he?”

“He’s not, especially given the Black Panther thing is public knowledge after Berlin, but Wakanda’s guaranteed a seat, T’Chaka bullied that into the accords before…” Rogers sighs. “He’s doing a lot through his rep on the council. And Nat says you have a hashtag.”

“‘Course I have a hashtag.” Tony stares into the middle distance for a long, long moment. Legally dead. Jesus. That’s new. He hadn’t been declared legally dead during _Afghanistan_ , it’s not like Stane could’ve pushed it through without tipping his hand. At least Rhodey wouldn’t have to waste three months searching for him. “I’ll. Talk to her. If she’s talking to me.”

“Of course she’s talking to you. She helped pull you out of there, after all.”

Tony snorts. “So did Barton, and Barton’s made his opinion of me pretty clear.”

Steve ducks his head with one of those meaningless smiles of his. “Okay, true, I’m pretty sure he volunteered for that entirely so he could lord it over you later.”

“Classy.”

“Tony…what’s going to happen with Stark Industries, and Iron Man?”

“You think I don’t update my will every three months?” Tony leans back, jiggling his leg. “I’m nothing more than a major shareholder these days, and my shares pass to Pepper. Iron Man’s IP goes into the company’s lockbox along with a bunch of my dad’s old shit. The military loan contract for War Machine stands, it’s signed under the company’s name, not mine. Has been since the start, Pepper hashed it out when I was busy, ah, crawlingintoabottleandwaitingtodie.” He’s silent for a moment, staring out the arched windows into the foggy gulf of jungle, until Rogers takes a breath like he’s going to ask something, so he cuts him off. “She’ll have to do some redistribution, but whatever, I trust her.” He misses her, so much it hurts. He wonders if she’s red-eyed this time, even if she’ll never have to job-hunt again. She’s better off without him, that much is pretty clear by now.

Rogers hesitates, and instead asks, carefully, “Could the fact that you died engaging in criminal activity mess with any of this?”

“It shouldn’t. I mean, the lawyers shored up around that as much as they could, given the shit I get up to in the suit, never really could predict what I’d be doing when I…jesus. I’m dead. I suppose this is old hat to you.”

Rogers laughs and shakes his head. “Sure, you can join the empty grave club with me and Nat and Fury.”

“When did she…”

Roger shrugs. “She’s Natasha, she’s probably got five.”

“Okay, fair enough. _Jesus_. Is this why T’Challa was being all ominous about not making contact with anybody without thinking it through?”

“In part. And we do have to be careful about where things are traced. He’d be in a bad position if it got out that half of Interpol’s-most-wanted are hiding behind him, and I don’t want to do that to him.”

“Yeah, he’s taking care of your boyfriend and everything,” Tony mutters.

Rogers opens his mouth, closes it, and looks away, like he can’t even protest the boyfriend part. Ugh.

Tony finishes the last bit of fruit, tosses the pit on Rogers’ place, wipes his fingers. “I wanna see him.”

Rogers goes quite still. “Tony. I can’t do that until I know where you’re going to jump.”

“Give me _some_ credit, Rogers,” Tony mutters, numb and surly. “I’m not stupid enough to pick a fight with you without my suit.”

Rogers studies him for a moment, swallows, and says, “What were you trying to do, when you wound up on the Raft?”

“Get a better look at Ross. Knock him down, however I could. And then I stumble into some sort of EM trap built just for me—the shorting out the suit part wasn’t wrong. Look. I still think we need the accords, in some form or another. I can’t accept zero accountability, I just can’t. But the enforcement, the Raft, all of that—it’s going too far.”

“Did you seriously expect anything else?” Rogers’ face is hard, wary. “You make our activities, our _existence_ subject to international law, you make it legitimate to treat us as an asset to be used and punished for disobedience, and it’s gonna happen. Compliance doesn’t change that, it just makes it easier to get away with.”

“We’re not _tools_ , that was never the point—” Tony grits his teeth on a stab of bitter, black frustration. “Jesus _fuck_ is there even a point to this conversation.”

“…no,” Rogers says after a minute, only a touch less guarded. “No, things are what they are. We’re hardly in a position to rewrite the accords right now.”

“Yeah, kind of hard to do when I’m dead. I’ll have to stage a comeback someday, I suppose…”

“Nat lifted the Raft’s security footage, because she’s like that.”

“Always looking for leverage…” Tony’s head is spinning. He still doesn’t have the shape of it. Not the true depth, the true scope. He folds his arms on the table and drops his head into them, too fucking tired to keep his guard up even around Rogers.

“Tony,” Rogers says, almost gently. “Would you have pushed that hard for the accords before Ultron?”

Tony jolts, and picks his head back up, and stares. “I don’t know,” he says, after a long moment, because it’s all he’s coming up with. “Probably. Or maybe not, I did also kind of go through a telling Congress to kiss my ass phase, damn it, Rogers, we’re—we’re—” He fidgets his fingers like he’s trying to pluck words out of the air, words that could possibly drag Rogers’ head out of his spangled ass for one second—

“It’s not the accountability I have a problem with. It’s the control.”

“Sure, until Barnes comes along, then you have one hell of a problem with—”

“That’s different. Would you have Clint and Dr. Selvig punished for collaborating with Loki? Tony, it’s the same—”

“No, no, it’s not,” Tony snaps. “That was a magic stick and—”

“You don’t need a magic stick to compromise somebody’s free will—”

“—nobody died—”

“—nobody you _know_ died, seriously, Tony, the Chitauri invasion would never have happened without them. I _know_ it’s personal with you and Bucky, and I’m sorry, I really am—”

He sounds like he’s _pleading_ , for fuck’s sake, and Tony blurts, before he can help it, “Fine, yes, of course everything’s personal, like you can talk, Ross hurt _Bruce_.”

Rogers stops, genuinely surprised. “What?”

“What do you mean, what, it was on the drive I sent to T’Challa, everything I could dig up.”

“I didn’t have time to read it all, I had a mission to plan—Tony, _what_?”

“We knew he was involved in the whole breaking Harlem thing, but not…” Tony grits his teeth, clenches his hands.

“Okay, maybe you did. I only knew he was ex-military.” Rogers’ face has gone cold, focused. “How deep does this go?”

Tony forces himself to relax his hands. Christ, he’s high-strung after that little frolic on the Raft. “I don’t know, define deep. Okay, so more than a decade ago, Ross was in charge of the bio-enhancement research division of the US Army.” He flicks his fingers in the general direction of Rogers’ chest. “Captain America Mark II, they’ve been chasing it for years. Serums combined with radiation—they had to reconstruct both halves pretty much from scratch, of course.”

“Right,” Rogers says quietly. “Because your father buried the designs for generating vita-rays.”

“Yup.” Tony snorts. “In the lockbox right next to Iron Man.” He tilts his head, actually a little surprised. “You knew?”

“Tony,” Rogers says, almost grim, “it’s one of the first things I looked into once Fury gave me access after I woke up. I know damn well that if those patents had stuck with the military, there’d be a very good case for my biology being government property. Especially with how weird biotech has gotten these days. Didn’t think at the time that dissection was a risk, but, well, Ross is a sick son of a bitch.” He’s watching Tony very carefully as he says that, almost like he’s concerned. “I think that’s been pretty well established. But where does Bruce come into this?”

Tony tries _very_ hard not to think about dissection. Right. Bruce. At least it’s goddamn impossible to dissect Bruce, the other guy’s got his ass covered there. “He was a civilian contractor, desperate for grant money because adjunct professors are the saddest people on the face of the earth, working on the radiation side of things. The serums were further along, they got higher priority, so Ross pretty much threw a contract at his daughter’s boyfriend to rush things and poach brainpower. And lied to him. Bruce thought he was working on radiation resistance, not enhancements, and Ross didn’t see fit to correct him when he volunteered to test the thing on himself. One zap later, the other guy’s torn up the lab, nearly killed a lot of folks, and Ross spends the next five years hunting him across the globe. Even gives an experimental serum dose under the table to some special-forces maniac named Blonsky to help bring him in.”

Rogers soaks that all up with tightly-controlled outrage. “So he’s been trying to control and use enhanced people since day one.” Silence. “And now he’s gotten himself into a position where he can enforce the accords, get his hands on anybody who breaks them…oh, hell. What happened to Blonsky and the serum?”

Tony laughs, bitter. “Serum project got defunded, but the research is still out there. As for Blonsky—well, there was some researcher supposedly working with Bruce in secret for a cure, but he turned out to be more experiment-happy than cure-happy, so he dosed Blonsky, and bam, super-hulk.”

“ _Super_ hulk.” Rogers pulls a face. “Strong as Bruce?”

“Stronger. Bruce won that one by the skin of his teeth.”

“And what then?”

Tony grins a very brittle grin. “Ross put Blonsky in a hole in Alaska. World Security Council wanted him on the Avengers, I helped make sure that didn’t happen.”

“Shit,” Rogers says, slow and distinct. “I don’t like the idea that Ross can hold a hulk. I _really_ don’t like the idea that he might have a hulk to sic on us. Especially when we can’t easily contact Thor.” He shakes himself a little. “Did you ever upgrade that satellite system after Cape Town?”

“Yeah, Veronica Mark II’s in orbit, Fury leaned on me pretty hard for that once Bruce took off. But I need my base armor to interface with it. War Machine can’t wear it, Bruce never gave me permission for that.”

“Well, Nat and I will get that back. And it’s probably worth talking to T’Challa when he has a moment. I don’t think I’ve seen a tenth of what this country’s capable of, and he’s apparently a top engineer himself.”

“Really.” Tony stares at him for a moment. “I’ve seen him going toe to toe with _you_ , and he’s also one of mine? That’s just unfair.”

“Well, now that he’s helping me, I can’t exactly complain.” It’s almost cheerful, but it fades quickly, and he leans back slowly in his chair and lets out a long sigh. “How could we not have known any of this?” he asks eventually.

“Big honking coverup. I knew a lot of what happened after Harlem, but not…not before. Not how Ross _used_ Bruce. And he never liked talking about this stuff.” Tony shrugs. “Or maybe for all I know, Fury and Romanoff knew it and compartmentalized it and took it to god-knows-where with them, and I busted my ass for nothing.”

Rogers shakes his head slowly. “Nat would’ve told me.” Like he has utter faith in that somehow. Then, after a moment of grim silence, “This is why I couldn’t buy into the accords. I can’t give—”

“No, nope, stop right there, you don’t get to be smug about Ross turning out to be dirty. You couldn’t _possibly_ have known that, you admitted you didn’t know shit about him, you were just being paranoid.”

Rogers opens his mouth like he’s going to protest that, and then stops, and bows his head.

Tony can’t resist a mutter of “so there.”

“No, you’re right, I’ll take that one.” Rogers is quiet for a moment, takes a deep slow breath, lets it out. “Finding out Hydra was in SHIELD…it got to me.” He looks back up at him, guileless, and Tony bites the inside of his cheek. The man’s infuriating. Even takes his punches with grace. “I don’t know if your end of the accords would’ve gone differently without Ultron, but mine…mine would’ve gone differently without that.”

“So what,” Tony mutters, after a taut pause, “you think Hydra’s got the UN council? The admittedly disgusting Secretary of State? Romanoff leaked those files for a reason, didn’t she? We’ve cleaned them out, it’s _done_.”

“Can you really believe that?” Rogers asks quietly.

“Could you maybe try to believe it for five seconds because otherwise we’re going nowhere fast? Not _everyone’s_ corrupt, Cap. Even just statistically speaking, and let me tell you, I’ve played ball with a lot more corrupt than you over the years. Came with the job.” Rogers opens his mouth, and Tony holds up a hand. “Ah ah ah, _work_ with me here, come on, five seconds. No, you’re right, I fucked up with Ross, didn’t know how deep I was going to get, and getting declared dead and dissected is really not my idea of a first date, but can we at _least_ agree that the implementation of the accords needs some serious housecleaning and the rest can wait until we know what things look like and can get any damned traction or wiggle room?”

Rogers draws himself up. “Of course. Ross gets defrocked, men and women who risk their lives protecting the earth don’t get thrown in supermax, and—” He pauses, eyes flicking down, then back up again. “Olive branch?” He offers his big hand across the table.

“Olive branch.” Tony shakes, without even that much hesitation. “Is defrocked the technical term? I mean it’s not like he’s even an ordained general anymore…”

Rogers shrugs, almost cracks a smile. “Stripped of any power he can abuse? I don’t know, I don’t _think_ we need to kill him.”

“Would be a PR nightmare.” Tony holds up a finger. “Also on the to-do list, we need better PR.” Pauses and puts it back down. “We need _any_ PR. My publicists think I’m dead. Ugh.”

“Yeah, and I’m on Interpol’s-most-wanted, I’m a lost cause.” That _is_ a smile. “At least we’ve got Vision?”

“God help us all.”

Rogers is silent for a moment, gathering up utensils and fruit leavings and cup and stacking them all on his plate, eyes half-closed and brow furrowed as if he’s running through something in his head, and when he’s done, he looks up, and says, carefully, “Come with me?”

“What, to the prom?” Tony jabs, and Rogers has the grace to just shake his head, and it occurs to Tony that he can’t actually be 100% sure that Captain America knows what a prom is. When were they invented again?

“You said you wanted to see him,” Rogers says quietly, and Tony feels all the life drain from his face.

“Yeah.” Tony swallows hard. “I mean, no, hell, I don’t want to, but I need to.”

“What are you going to do?”

Tony’s silent for a long, long moment. Long enough for a—a _drone_ , a freaking flying cafeteria drone, to spot them and drift over in near silence to scoop their empty plates into its maw. Tony watches it in fascination, watches it beep sadly and fumble with his fork before taking pity and tossing it in. This place is really something else.

“I don’t know,” he mumbles eventually, and the breeze from the drone’s wake makes the hair on his arms stand on end.


	3. Chapter 3

It’s a long and corridor-threading walk, an elevator ride, more walking. Three or four cats cross their path, the things are everywhere. They’ve both fallen into an awkward silence. Rogers stands in the elevator with his hands folded in front of him and his chin up. Tony fidgets with the tracker on his wrist and discovers that it’s also a watch, a GPS, has a miniature map of the city loaded into it, complete with grayed-out areas.

The little blue Tony dot is heading into one of those areas, in fact, once they turn into a particular wing. The door blats, remains stubbornly closed. Rogers frowns, stares at it for a moment, and taps something into the panel. Another moment, while Tony rocks back and forth on his heels, and it opens. The gray areas aren’t labeled. Secure wing? Cellblock—is T’Challa being less hippie about this than he’s letting on? He can’t read any of the signs. Rogers navigates unerringly and Tony doesn’t remember until he tries to shove his hands in his pockets that he’s _still_ in Raft prison grays and blues, embarrassingly enough, so he fidgets with his trouser seams instead, increasingly on edge.

He still doesn’t know what he’s going to do. It’s—disconcerting, a little, but well, he’s always been an impulsive guy. Can’t stamp that out overnight, no matter how much he tried. “I just want to look him in the eye,” he blurts, “and ask…”

But he doesn’t know what he needs to ask.

Rogers stops, turns to Tony with something like _sadness_ in his face, and Tony didn’t expect that at all.

“It’s not…” Rogers pauses, bows his head, falls back into step. “You’ll see. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, helpful,” Tony mutters, and picks up the pace, nerves raw. He can hear low murmurs as they come around the corner, women’s voices, and it’s English, for once.

“…maybe? But…he’s not going to let that happen. And we _had_ people who knew him better than me.” A pause. “Maybe I’m only good at getting into people’s fear.”

“Why would there be a limitation like that? You can move objects, you can move minds. You might not have done it this way before, that’s true, but you probably need to believe that you can.”

“My powers…don’t always make sense—”

It’s Wanda, of course, and he recognizes Natasha’s voice. They’re framing a door at the end of the hall, Wanda with her arms folded tight across her, and she stops mid-sentence as they round the corner and stares at Tony, fey and inscrutable.

“Hi,” drawls Natasha, chin up with some cant of her eyebrows that’s morse code to Rogers, answered with a tiny, jerky nod of his head.

Tony drops Wanda’s gaze with a chill in his gut—he can’t shake her thousand-yard-stare from the Raft, slumped on the floor in that straitjacket and control collar, and where the hell had Ross gotten the data to build that thing anyway, that was another disturbing question that he hadn’t yet found an answer for. Wanda pauses only a moment before she shoulders off the wall where she’s been leaning and brushes past Rogers on her way out.

“I didn’t know,” Tony blurts, just as she passes them in a swish of red and black kente, and she freezes, and just barely looks over her shoulder at him.

“About the Raft?” she bites out, accent thick.

“They’d put Cap and Wilson in a conference room with a Starbucks order the first time around, yes, I didn’t know.”

She’s silent for a long moment, tense, and then says, “Don’t think I’m stupid. I know you, Stark.”

And then she’s gone, before Tony can even figure out what that’s supposed to mean. He shrugs it off with a shudder, turns, marches past Natasha. And has to wait on Rogers to open this door too.

It’s—a medical lab, Tony guesses, from one look around, and his gut does a strange flip-flop. He _knew_ he hadn’t hurt him that much. Had he? Okay, sure, he’d ripped off his arm, but not the one that bleeds, that can’t have been _that_ bad—

Then he spots the cryostasis tube.

He _feels_ Rogers looming next to him, and doesn’t bother to look over. Doesn’t take his eyes off Barnes, frost-dusted and motionless and uninjured. Looking peaceful. Tony’s _lost_ , straight-up lost. No way Rogers fought that hard for his is-this-actually-his-boyfriend to stick him back in a freezer. No way.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Tony mutters after a long moment. Silence. “No, really, what the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

Rogers paces into his view, protective, and for a moment, his face hardens, his eyes flinty. And then he bites back whatever he was going to say, and is very quiet, and sighs, and lets his head sag. One hand on the glass. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does. We’re just…we’re trying to fix it.”

“What is there _possibly_ to fix,” Tony says, jaw tight.

Rogers looks over at him blankly for a moment before a light goes on. “Right, there was…never time to explain.” He tucks his hand back into his pocket and turns back to Tony, chin up, numbly professional. “He’s got trigger words, an activation code. Deep conditioned. Zemo got his hands on those records somehow. He got him into the UN, set up the power outage, impersonated the psychologist, all to get access to him when he was helpless and trigger him so that he would obediently answer questions. So he could debrief him about—what happened to your parents.”

Tony has to swallow twice, hard, until he comes up with words. “Yeah, his plan was sheer elegance in its simplicity. I suppose you’re gonna tell me that’s why Barnes tried to shoot me in the face.”

“Yes. He wasn’t himself when he was breaking out of the UN. He didn’t even have a gun when we were running from the police in Bucharest, he was trying to minimize casualties.”

“Oh, good for him, he gets a cookie.” Tony doesn’t try to hide the black bitterness. Just jitters, turns on his heel, paces, remembers absentmindedly that Barnes hadn’t carried a gun to the airport battle either. “Was this where you got the Siberia intel from?”

Rogers nods. “Howa—your father was working on another try of the serum. He’d cooked up five doses, they were in the car. I don’t know if they were the only ones, for all I know it was the same formula that went into Blonsky, but it was strong. Those operatives could take Bucky in hand-to-hand, they used him for training.”

“ _Shit_ on a stick,” Tony hisses. “I knew he was obsessed with you, I didn’t know _he_ was trying for Mark II. Goddamn idiot.”

Rogers has the good grace to drop his gaze and look awkward.

“And, what, you got all this from Barnes? You seriously trust him?”

Rogers’ gaze comes back up. “Yes.” There’s that goddamn Captain America conviction in his eyes. “As long as he knows me, I trust him. You saw the stasis chambers, all that was true. He had no reason to think Zemo was after anything but them.” He drops his gaze. “They didn’t give him the names of his targets, standard operating procedure, Tony, he—neither of us knew. But I…know it can’t be easy to trust me right now.”

“Yeah, because you’re _so_ clear-headed when it comes to this guy.”

“He’s my friend,” Rogers says quietly. “Would you trust Rhodey?”

“Fuck you, Rogers,” Tony hisses, and breaks off to rattle about the lab for a moment. Jesus Christ. _That_ was a mental image he didn’t need. War Machine’s guns pinging off his armor as they dogfought over the expo—no, no, that was _entirely_ different. He misses him, suddenly, urgently, and shoves that down hard. He’s got no right, not after what he’s done to him.

“So what,” Tony mumbles eventually, staring at the wall. “Still doesn’t explain why he’s a popsicle.”

“He…insisted.” Rogers’ voice is quiet, solemn. “Everything that happened in Berlin…that was what he was terrified of. What he’d been running from since Washington. He can’t trust himself to be safe as long as that stuff is in his head. So until we can find a better way to undo the conditioning, he’s staying here. His call.”

Tony slams the heel of his hand into the wall. He’s crackling with—shit, he doesn’t even know what. Anger? Defeat? Indignation? Where did Barnes get off, trying to be a goddamn hero? Man kills somebody’s family in cold blood and has an entire team looking after him?

“Tony,” Rogers says carefully. “It wasn’t his—”

“Shut up.”

For once in his goddamn life, he shuts up.

Tony shakes out his hand, makes a few abortive grabbing motions at nothing, and turns, pointing. “What do you mean, better.”

Rogers looks faintly taken aback. “Better?”

“Better way to undo the conditioning.” Tony swallows. He doesn’t even know why he’s asking, except that Rogers keeping a million secrets is pissing him off. Isn’t Captain goddamn America supposed to be honest?

Rogers gives a tiny nod. “Wanda tried.”

Tony shudders slightly. “ _Wanda_ , yikes, because letting _her_ in goes so well.”

Rogers looks very much like he’s ignoring that on purpose. “It was Natasha’s idea. Bucky consented. She linked our minds—Natasha because she knows the most about brainwashing, me because I know the most about Bucky. But she couldn’t control it well enough. We were in his mind, but we couldn’t find the conditioning, never mind do anything about it, we…pretty much got lost.” He sounds almost sheepish to admit it.

“Yeah, don’t think Google Maps is gonna help you there.”

Rogers gives an entirely humorless smile. “Nope.” And blows out a sigh. “She’s trying to figure out whether it’s worth another go, but Bucky wanted to go back down in the meantime, he was pretty discouraged.”

“Cry me a river,” Tony mumbles.

Rogers is silent for a moment, then says, a little slowly, “Tony, if you could, what would you ask him?”

“I don’t _know_ , didn’t I say that?” He feels another crawling wave of frustration run through him, tries to blow it out. “There’s. Nothing to ask. You saw the same damn video I did, he _did_ it. You ever watched a guy strangle your mom, Cap?” Rogers actually flinches at that, and Tony feels some sick satisfaction. “And then have to listen to everyone else saying no, just forget it, go sit down and play nice with him and care about his problems?”

“Tony—” Rogers swallows hard. “That’s not what I’m saying. You _know_ about the brainwashing. He didn’t have a choice. He _tried_ when he recognized Howard. Hydra did this, all of this—”

“Hydra, Hydra, have you considered that there’s _maybe_ a problem in the world you can’t brush off by yelling oh look a snake?”

“Not this one. I thought you were a scientist, Tony, why can’t you accept the truth of this?”

“The _truth—_ don’t even talk to me about the truth, you don’t even give enough of a damn to tell anyone that your _old friend_ Howard was murdered.”

Rogers pales and drops his gaze.

Tony stares wild-eyed at the displays built into the side of the pod, blinking lifesigns silently on the wall. Five minutes with those and he could make sure the crazy bastard never woke up. Sure they’re probably secure, but he’s Tony fucking Stark. And the thought makes him _sick_ , so sick that the off-spec hamburger is trying to say hello and his blood feels like ice for even letting that cross his brain, and he doesn’t know what Rogers is reading on his face, but it can’t be good, because he stiffens and says, with an edge in his voice this time, “ _Tony_.”

“I’m not gonna kill him in his sleep Jesus Christ who do you think I am,” Tony mutters, and turns on his heel and marches out of the room. It’s a march, not a run. _Damn_ it. Rogers only follows for a few steps, thank fuck, and Tony makes it down the hall and around a corner before sticking his face into the wall and trying to breathe. Just breathe. Hell.

“That went well.” It’s Natasha, blasé and distant, from around the corner.

“As…as well as I could expect, I suppose.” It’s harder to make out Rogers; his voice is low, tired, doesn’t carry as well. “I can’t ask him to…” Some mumbles. Tony tries to ignore them and keep breathing, at least until he hears “…Iron Man suit. Ross doesn’t have easy legal access to War Machine, so leaving the suit’s a major risk.”

“Already on it. I’ve been chasing leads since we left the Raft, trying to work out where it’s likely to be. Hey, maybe Lang’s petty criminal background’ll be useful, it’s been a while since I had a good heist.”

Faint laughter. “Aren’t we all petty criminals now?”

“Sure, _I_ am, I got amnesty for everything before I tased the king of Wakanda. And he thanked me later. You’re an accessory to Interpol’s second most wanted, you’re a little beyond petty.”

“Makes you wonder who the hell is most wanted.”

“I know, right?”

Tony’s heard enough. More than enough. He groans and peels himself off the wall and pulls up his map, and tries to figure out where the hell he’s supposed to stay, because he desperately wants a shower.

 

* * *

 

Tony finds his room, one of a small wing of posh guest rooms that got assigned to the not-Avengers, complete with a sprawling common room that he avoids exploring because Barton and that shrinking guy are playing cards and that’s the last thing he needs right now. The room is nice, even by his standards. The showerhead has fifteen settings, and he twists his way through them until he finds one that feels like pounding needles, and sets it hot as it goes, and scrubs his skin off. Huddles under it for a long, long while, shuddering as it pounds on his tender bare scalp, until he feels a little less sick with himself.

He feels—numb, mostly, by now. Exhausted, hung over from too much panic, but he doesn’t dare sleep. He drips naked around the room, realizes he never _had_ asked Rogers why he’d split his lip on the ride back, but what the hell, it doesn’t matter. He was drugged. He was probably just panicking. He _so_ does not need Rogers asking questions about that. Fucking embarrassing.

He finds a closet with a few pairs of loose trousers, sandals. Soft tanks and t-shirts. A jacket, collarless and square-cut with a subtle geometric print. Browns and greens, so not his colors. He settles for trousers and a t-shirt, finds a trash can to shove his flop-sweaty prison blues into with prejudice.

His wrist tracker bings: a doctor, wanting to follow up and make sure his system’s clear of the drugs. He goes, tolerates it, gets an all-clear, leaves. Gets himself lost for a good hour, watches the sun set. Finds more food. With that weighing him down, he starts to weave, lose focus, so he drags his ass back to his room and prepares to battle sleep.

The bed is ridiculously comfortable, and Tony turns the AC in the room to max and huddles in it. Sort of dozes, passes in and out of awareness twenty times. Has one of those rounds of obsessive sort-of-dreaming where his waking thoughts blend into his sleeping thoughts and just get crazier, and everything is terrible and full of bonesaws and war heroes dead at his hands and just goes in circles forever.

He gives up after an indeterminate while, stands in the now-chilly bathroom and stares at his bald reflection in bleary, protracted disgust. There are reddish spots. Maybe razor burn, maybe always there and never discovered, who knows. He’s too young for old man spots, right? Deep circles under his eyes. He wonders how long it’ll take his hair to grow back out.

“Look at this asshole,” he mutters. “Can’t even keep hating the guy who killed his mom. What would Dad think.”

Which is a ridiculous thing to say. Guy killed his mom. He still hates him. Right?

Tony officially gives up on any hope of sleep, leaves the bathroom because that’s just fucking maudlin, and goes to explore the TV in lieu of a workshop. Menus fan out, and he wanders through them with the remote, and finds the block of American channels. Starts flipping. _Law & Order_. Baseball game. Cake decorating. Halfway around the world in the middle of the jungle there’s still cake decorating shows, at least _something_ still makes sense. As much sense as cake decorating shows ever did.

He passes through some news channels, and that’s a trainwreck. Eight o’clock—he pulls up the TV menu, currently reading fuck o’clock, and makes a vague attempt to remember Wakanda’s time zone. A full third of the eight o’clock news is him, and he knows he shouldn’t watch, it makes his stomach curl, but, well, trainwreck. He’s always been susceptible to hatewatching in his darker hours. Three or four different news hours running nearly identical segments of “Tony Stark: American Hero?” Rhodey’d apparently filed a formal complaint with the council about the circumstances of his death. Tony hadn’t even known you _could_ file a formal complaint with the council, apparently Rhodey was the only one of them who’d bothered to read the whole one-inch slab, but well, he’s had a lot of time on his hands, and colonels read a lot of one-inch slabs of regulations. Rhodey’d appeared, given his statement, and left, consummate professional the whole time. They keep playing clips of it, the same heaviness to his shoulders as he sits there in full dress, medals out, over and over. Walking exoskeleton glimmering black and silver over the blue of his trousers.

Tony’s clicked past to another channel before he even registers what he’d heard, and his blood turns to ice, and he grits his teeth and changes back, because somebody on TV just said Ultron, and he needs to know that it’s nothing. But the somebody is the US rep on the council, and it’s not nothing, it’s— _attempting to make sense of the data impounded from Mr. Stark’s private server after his death, but it is clear that he had at least some involvement in the creation of the very entity that caused the disaster in Sokovia._ Russia’s rep staring down the camera’s stormy-faced with a tic in his brow. Wakanda’s is impassive, enormous earrings glittering as she studies the rest of the council.

Ross is in the background, with a handful of other suits, and his gaze catches the camera like steel, and Tony feels his breath hiccup in his throat, wiggles his jaw.

_This is inexcusable_ , Sokovia’s rep is gritting out, and Tony can’t even blame him. _Ms. Romanoff lied to us and betrayed her commitment to this council, and now we find out that Mr. Stark had been nothing more than a raving villain all along? To say nothing of all those who never signed? Is there even a point to this council, to the accords, if none of them will accept oversight?_

“Raving villain, okay, that’s a _touch_ extreme,” Tony mutters, letting the remote fall to the couch. There’s a little more posturing. Vision and Rhodey’re both going to be called in for questioning by the council as part of the investigation into Ultron. Every time Ross looks at the camera, Tony feels like there are metal bars closing over his face.

It cuts back to commentary, a panel of three talking heads who are— _in light of the exclusive coverage from the UN—_ clearly set on tearing him to pieces, complete with clips from all his most maverick moments. Claiming he’d privatized world peace during a congressional inquiry. Swearing to kill the Mandarin on live TV. They’d attempted to reach Pepper for a statement, but she hadn’t given them the time of day, and he can’t even tell whether to be relieved at that. She’d known—of course she’d known. She couldn’t _not_ know. Saw all the news coming in from Sokovia, all the crazy robot-in-the-streets footage, and had found Tony when he’d finally straggled back home and run her hands through his hair and asked _almost_ gently why he’d built them.

_Secretary Ross’ task force has protected the world from threat that’s been growing for years_. _And we have to start asking the hard questions. How many of these attacks that the so-called Avengers protected us from were in fact engineered by them? Theater for their own self-aggrandizement, regardless of the cost in human life?_

Tony chokes, fumbles for the remote, and switches it off, because if he didn’t manage to do it then, he’d be hatewatching this shit all night.

“Jesus,” he mumbles, and puts his head between his knees. He’s feeling dizzy, not really a full-blown anxiety attack, but he’s sleep-deprived and raw from shock and it’s been one technicolor hell of a day and now _this_ —he’s trying to remember how much would be on whatever private server Ross had impounded, he’s trying to remember which clause in the goddamn accords gave him the right to do that, if any. His brain feels like soup. At least—at least this wouldn’t be how Pepper found out that her dead ex nearly destroyed the world. At least there’s that.

It’s suddenly so, so tempting to stay dead. Just—throw it all away. Clean Slate Protocol Mark II. Let the world bury Tony Stark however they want—as Ultron’s creator, raving villain, black hat on the headstone, whatever, it wouldn’t matter. It can’t bring down Pepper, not really, he’s been pretty divorced from SI for six years and her PR department’s better than that. Let it all be over.

Just be. Just be what? Iron Man?

Tony flops back on the overly comfortable white couch and laughs, and laughs, and laughs, with no humor in it whatsoever. Well, that would be one way for Pepper to find out he’s alive after all—suing the shiny metal pants off whatever mysterious vigilante is using Iron Man tech. Hell, you go off the cards just a bit at a press conference eight years ago, and now the trap closes. _I am Iron Man_. Inextricably tied to Tony Stark. Stay dead, throw away the suit.

Stay here, throw away his family. Whatever that meant. Rogers was being far too optimistic in that stupid little letter of his. The Avengers had never worked. Dear god, Tony had tried, but—well, Rogers’d gotten most of the kids in the divorce, hadn’t he? And Tony had left the rest behind. And they all had reason to hate him.

Stay here, throw away his _family_. Let the guy who murdered them get away scot-free. Rogers hadn’t had to say the deal out loud, but it was clear enough. Whore away justice, whore aware revenge, if he wants any chance of taking down Ross, of _fixing_ this, of making a future for them that’s anything other than running forever or rotting beneath the sea at the first mistake.

Dawn comes up over Wakanda in a wash of cold white, mist rising like the whole jungle is exhaling outside his window, glowing in the pre-dawn light. Then colors stack in the sky, then the tropical sun sears up over the horizon. Tony watches it all, plastered up against the warm glass of his window, feeling hollow.

“You’re a mechanic, right,” he whispers, breath fogging the glass. “So build something.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summer doldrums vs. fic writing: faito. On the upside, next few chapters should come quickly. Like that might actually be true this time, five's a paragraph or two away from done.

T’Challa clears a 10 am for him, which leaves Tony with a couple of doldrum hours to eat and avoid everybody he knows before a Wakandan woman hones in out of nowhere to collect him. She’s taller than him even without the heels that Pepper would die for, just as sharply dressed and efficient, but nowhere near as polite, and she carries herself like an unsheathed blade. Tony straightens without even realizing it.

The large and lush royal office doesn’t look particularly different from any other high office Tony’s been in, except for the decor—afrofuturist as hell, unsurprisingly. The desk straight-up levitates. A couple of the masks on the walls have to be at _least_ six hundred years old. T’Challa waves him towards one of the armchairs in the sit-and-pitch corner, dismisses the escort graciously in his own language, and rounds the desk to claim a second chair.

“Good morning, Mr. Stark. I hope you are feeling better.”

“Sure, I’ve been worse.” He ploughs on without taking breath, he does _not_ need that conversation. “Okay, you wanted to know my next move, I’m playing along. I’m with you guys against Ross, at least whatever I can do while I’m dead. If weird shit threatens the planet, I’ll help whoever’s lined up to kick its ass. Though if I’m dead, I can’t publicly use Iron Man even when we get it back.”

“You still need it back to guard your secrets, I assume.”

“Yeah. Well, and. If it’s a serious emergency, like a big-brown-Hulk-shaped emergency, I can use it to call Veronica, which is the only line of defense unless you’ve got something huge up your sleeve. It’ll blow my cover if it winds up on the news, but, well, Hulk.”

T’Challa’s brow furrows, and yet even that manages to be graceful. “Veronica?”

“You ever see footage from the Hulk incident in Cape Town?” T’Challa nods, chilly, and Tony swallows. “Yeah, not exactly our proudest moment. Giant armor was something I designed with Bruce’s help, specifically to be able to go toe to toe with the big guy if he ever lost it. Which, for the record, was not a likely thing. _He_ wanted the contingency. Bruce’s self-control’s been tight as shit for years, let me just put that out there. Anyway.” He’s running off at the mouth, he knows, words coming almost faster than he can manage, but he can’t even bring himself to care. “Veronica’ll be handy to have on call if Blonsky comes into play.”

“Agreed.”

“So what’s the play with Ross?”

T’Challa sighs and leans back in his armchair. “The accords were not written to violate human rights. Ross is taking liberties. With evidence, sympathy from the council, and perhaps some public outrage, I intend to push through a vote of no confidence in Secretary Ross, and an amendment to prevent such abuses in the future.”

“Sounds like a tall order.”

“Yes. But not, I think, impossible.”

“We can’t win much public sympathy when we’re on the run, catch 22.” Tony scratches his goatee. “And his biggest liberty taken was me, and he’s already sabotaged that play, he’s making a good pass at painting me as a supervillain so that the pity card carries less weight. Hell, he’s got us backwards and in heels.”

There’s a wry quirk of T’Challa’s lips. “And I cannot give this my all. I am new to the throne, and there is much I must do here. Ms. Romanoff is coordinating intelligence, and I’m pulling on the council how I can.”

“So hurry up and wait, huh.”

“At the moment. Thank you again for gathering what you did. I suggest you coordinate with Ms. Romanoff when you have the chance.”

“Y’know, my schedule’s full up with being dead, but I’ll see what I can do.”

T’Challa _almost_ smiles. Almost. Damn it. “Will you be able to work well with the others after all that happened?”

Tony shrugs. “I can play nice with Rogers, anyone else who’s willing, that’s on them. Romanoff’s a goddamn professional, we’ll be fine. Barnes is a popsicle and—” He swallows hard and flutters his fingertips. “Currently irrelevant. Though I gotta admit one thing, the hypocrisy’s bothering me. You were a goddamn bulldog when _you_ thought Barnes killed your dad, and here you are protecting him from me when he actually did.”

T’Challa barely even reacts. “Are you not aware that I remanded Helmut Zemo to the Hague when I dropped you off after Siberia?”

“Uh, actually, no? I was kind of a little unconscious—though thanks for the lift, did I say that at the time, I probably didn’t say that at the time.”

“You are welcome, and carry no debt.”

“So…seriously. You spend that whole time trying to shred Barnes like a cat toy, then you find the guy who really did it and just—let him go?”

T’Challa’s quiet for a moment, studying him, and looks like an impassive monolith until Tony realizes that he’s fidgeting, subtly, running his fingertip over one of his heavy rings, over and over. “I stood on the roof of that bunker and listened to Zemo tell me how his family died in Sokovia, without expression, because he had lost his soul entirely to revenge. And I could hear you and Steven and James tearing each other apart below me.”

 _James_. Double yikes. Tony grits his teeth. “What, and you decided you’d be better than us?”

T’Challa brushes that off with an infinitesimal shrug. “I saw where that path led, and realized I could not let myself continue, and chose another. Every man has that power and that right. It is what sets us apart from machines.”

“See, sometimes I think it’s the other way around—an AI can predict, reevaluate, reprioritize without getting caught up in the—the shit we get stuck on. It can let go of stuff cleanly. Sometimes not for the best, sure, but…” This is embarrassing. The sleep deprivation is really starting to hit him if he’s babbling to strangers.

“A true AI, without constraints, yes.” T’Challa pauses, then asks, almost delicately, “Are you struggling with letting go of revenge?”

“Yup, that’s me, news at eleven.” It comes almost as easily as his old flippant brush-offs to the merchant-of-death spiel. Less rehearsed. “Okay, speaking of not letting go of things, I’m going to want a workshop, that’s the biggest thing I have trouble letting go of, I am going to be a nightmare for everyone if I can’t make myself useful.”

T’Challa looks at him for a long moment without the slightest reaction, long enough that Tony opens his mouth to say something else without even deciding what he was going to say, and then says, very distinctly, without raising his voice, “Tell me about Ultron.”

Tony gives the hiccup of sheer terror that he generally reserves for exes making jokes about meeting the kid. It was even apropos, really, Ultron’d been a fine example of why he was never going to reproduce. “You saw the news,” he manages.

“I monitor the council,” T’Challa says mildly.

Tony swallows. “Why.”

“Because if you are going to make things in my country, I would like to know why you made that. A man can often be measured by his creations.”

Oh, boy. Well, if T’Challa’s going to come out of this locking him out of every lab in the country forever, might as well get it over with. “True AIs, reprioritizing, sure,” he mumbles, and then jitters to his feet. “Okay. Hell. You want the long version or the short version.”

“We have forty-six minutes,” T’Challa says after a moment, no doubt checking his watch. Generous. Forty-six whole minutes of royal time, obnoxiously generous. Tony bites back a groan.

So he starts with Strucker’s Hydra cell and the Iron Legion and the captured scepter. Talks circles. T’Challa absorbs it patiently, puts in the occasional question—had Strucker already been building something like Ultron? “Probably, maybe, I don’t know. Ultron could access resources there once he hopped to the web, certainly, it’s why he did his thing in Sokovia. I didn’t get a thorough look—” Tony bites back whatever he was going to say next. That hallucination in Strucker’s lab—Wanda’s on thin enough ice, she doesn’t need to take flak for it. “I was a bit distracted by the giant Chitauri skeleton, okay, those things give me the creeps.” He pauses, turns on his heel—of course he’d started pacing, he couldn’t even remember when. “I went through that portal. In New York. I don’t know how much you know about that, it was kind of huge but you’re kind of here, I saw—another world, this huge _hive_ in space, utterly. Alien.” His throat is dry. “And huge. And Earth was this tiny blue thing behind me, and all they wanted was to wipe it out, and sure, we pushed them back this time, but the next? The next. Thor said once—prince of Asgard, honest to god alien, very warrior king, you’d like him—that the cosmos knew that Earth was ready for a higher form of war.”

“That was…four years ago, yes?”

“Yup. No telling when it’ll happen again, but they’re out there, they’re.” _You could have done more_. Tony shakes his head, keeps pacing. “I trashed my suits in ’13. Thought it was…where I needed to go. Stop staying up for three days straight designing the third upgrade that month and driving my girlfriend up the wall, very rightfully up the wall. But I couldn’t get New York out of my head. Started dreaming of building a system to do it for me. Automated wide-scale extraterrestrial threat response, a suit of armor around the world. Codenamed it Ultron. Didn’t get anywhere beyond the blue sky phase, it needed an AI generations beyond what we’ve got. Scrapped it, built the Iron Legion, realized I couldn’t quit fighting, etcetera. Then we pick up that scepter Sokovia two years later and—it’s there. The model. True AI, thinking on a scale that could make Ultron work.”

“Did you download it or copy the schematic?” T’Challa seems—well, not yelling at him yet, all right.

“Copy, I’m not _quite_ that stupid. The schematic was—genius. Turned out to be from some freaking cosmically powerful space rock, don’t even ask me what Thor was going on about when it came to that, it looked like a computer core to me. Anyway, we had three days until it went back to Asgard along with Thor, so we worked our butts off to make a prototype before the source schematic went poof.”

“We?”

“Bruce and I. Yeah, that Bruce. I talked him into it. Didn’t tell the rest of the team, didn’t have time to argue over it, I just wanted a goddamn prototype. Had a hell of a time getting it to interface with the Legion, left Jarvis cooking it…”

He stops. Stares dimly into the middle distance at one of the masks on the wall. Slowly slides his hands into his pockets and bows his head.

“Jarvis?” T’Challa prompts.

“My AI. Basic personal assistance at first, then he was my on-board system for Iron Man, then he ran the Legion. Decade old by then. One of the most evolved emergent programs around when Ultron ripped through him to access the internet. Good friend.” He swallows, rocks back and forth on his heels. “He survived that, not that I realized it at the time. Tough old guy. Became part of Vision, in the end, more or less, that’s its own mostly separate stupid story.”

T’Challa lets him stew for a moment. “So you developed this intelligence recklessly, with little oversight and uncertain variables, and with earnest intention. What went wrong?”

“Ehff.” Tony gives another rock, and then back to pacing. “You know, I don’t entirely know. At first I thought, okay, yeah, maybe copying an AI schematic from a dangerous alien device was not so great an idea, maybe there was something in the schematic itself that dragged Ultron’s reasoning south that I hadn’t caught. But then Vision came along, and he’s got that exact same magic space rock and/or computer core in his head, and he’s legit. Like angelic-presence-descended-among-us legit, it’s ridiculous. So it was—something I messed up, somewhere in there, that let Ultron evolve so far off the rails.”

“True AI is truly unpredictable. You weren’t there when he activated?”

“No. We were having zero luck getting Ultron to integrate with the Legion, we left Jarvis on security because we had to put in appearances at Thor’s goodbye party. Ultron spontaneously activated, burned through Jarvis, sucked down our entire database, evolved his working definition of ‘peace’ to be ‘global extinction because humans are shit-flinging monkeys,’ activated the Iron Legion to distract us, and ran away through the internet.”

“Must have been quite a party.”

Tony laughs with no mirth. “I don’t see how that’s a party. To quote Romanoff.” He makes one more round of the room, something bubbling up inside him. “I don’t want to build things that hurt people,” he blurts finally, turning to face him, so earnest it hurts. “I want to build things that help people. Protect people. Just can’t seem to figure out the difference before the dust clears. Hell, I was defending Ultron as sound on principle until the casualty reports rolled in from Sokovia.”

He stalls out. The silence is terrible. T’Challa’s watching him with feline intensity, until he finally draws breath and says, “Mr. Stark, if there is a single man in the world who truly has a universally acceptable answer to that question, the human condition would be unrecognizable. And quite a few engineers would sleep better at night.”

Tony just stares at him.

“And I say this as somebody who has built things that will never, ever be taken out of their lockers unless the children—not the soldiers, not even the borders, but the _children_ of Wakanda are in danger. The difference is not in the invention, but in the use and control of it. That’s bald fact. But those who build are responsible for taking consequences into account. And that is why we do not deploy true AIs.”

“Because you can’t control the consequences,” Tony mutters, sinking back down in his chair. It implies that Wakanda _has_ true AIs. He can’t even bring himself to be surprised.

“Because at the point when they do not have constraints on their evolution, they are like people, and must earn trust before power.”

“Hff.” Tony folds his hands, tight and fidgeting, mind going in rapid, tight circles around the accords, Ultron, himself. “Peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy. Would you agree with that?”

“Only if the stick is stable, controllable, kept in an impenetrable box, and brought out only during emergencies, such that any outsider who knows about it will either die where they stand or be the sole survivor who runs gibbering to beg their commanders back home to never touch our borders again. That is the Wakandan way.” He shrugs, unassuming, even as Tony feels a faint chill. “I thought you would have learned your lesson about stick-shaking during your cold war.”

“Some of us. That was my dad’s big line. He helped develop the a-bomb, in case you are one of the few people ever who doesn’t know who my father was, which is actually quite refreshing.”

“Ah.” Something subtle crosses T’Challa’s face that Tony can’t quite read. “That does explain a lot.”

“I’m not him,” Tony says in a rush, stiff. “I don’t have to be him.”

“No. But any tree grows differently in the shadow of another than it does in the open field.” T’Challa’s quiet for a moment, then says, “What troubles me about Ultron is the scope of it. The way you felt entitled to build something that would fundamentally change the world, in secret, with no oversight, not even that of your teammates.”

“Yeah, well, that’s why I signed onto the accords.” He tosses it out with little heat; his gaze is already sliding away across the room, and he’s wondering where he’d go to lie low if not here, whether he should just come back from the dead and deal with shit head-on, when his wristband beeps.

“There’s a laboratory in the university that was set up for a possible visiting scientists program,” T’Challa says, quite calm, as Tony jerks his head back around in surprise. “It should have everything you need, and if not, the contact information for the administrator is there, along with directions and access.” He gestures to Tony’s wrist.

“Whoa. Thanks.”

“Your work will be monitored, and you will not be granted access to vibranium or any information on its use, nor the biochemical lab, given your field. Beyond that, I look forward to seeing what you will create next.”

“Gotta say, I’m pleasantly surprised, you sounded like you were about to get into a lecture.”

“I saw no need.” There’s another one of those little quirks to his lips which Tony is starting to realize is his carefully contained humor. “You seem to reevaluate and reprioritize quite readily, even if you have trouble letting go.”

Tony almost laughs. “Beep boop.”

“Is there anything else you need?”

“Uh.” Tony spins his wheels for a moment. It’s seriously tempting to ask for a room in a separate wing, not cheek-to-jowl with everybody he’s pissed off recently, but it feels uncomfortably like cowardice, and what if the shower wasn’t as nice? He can’t think of anything else. Material, at least. There’s a lot he feels like he’s missing about this guy. “Okay, so I’m curious. Your dad—my condolences, by the way—was knee-deep in the accords, he couldn’t possibly have gotten that involved just since Lagos.”

T’Challa inclines his head. “You’re right.” He lets a sigh slip, and his fingers close back over that ring. “Secretary Ross, the inhuman panic, and various other factors corrupted something that my father had been working towards since the fall of SHIELD, more so since Ultron’s attack. Your world is fast reaching a singularity, Mr. Stark. The very landscape of accepted reality is changing, and if people do not change with it, there is a very real chance humanity will end.” Tony shudders. “We here in Wakanda long ago faced our singularity, and there is much we can endure that you cannot. But not everything.”

“Yeah, a meteor’s a meteor.”

“Just so. And so my father reached beyond our borders, as no king has done before. It was controversial. But I agree with him. SHIELD and the security council behind it were despicable, and they controlled the Avengers. Hydra or no Hydra, it matters little. We were glad to see them fall. But they left a void, and the Avengers privatized by an American corporation were no better. My father wanted to fill that void with an international platform, a system to guide and support the Avengers. To keep you from acting towards political ends, distance you from American imperialism, provide you with the infrastructure for effective large-scale operations, and make you an organization that we could work with comfortably. As the Black Panther, I am the protector of Wakanda, and if I know of a threat to this world that we live on, I will step up alongside you to face it.”

“Which would be sweet,” Tony mumbles. “That’s…hell, that’s what I hoped the accords could be too, if I got in there on the ground level, built up a little good will, started throwing it around. I always knew SHIELD was sketchy. I trust Pepper with anything, but I knew privatizing was a stopgap. Ross’ involvement was an alarm bell, but…not enough of a one for me to listen, I suppose.”

“Support and oversight turned into control.” T’Challa sighs. “This is why I hate politics. What do you think it would take for Captain Rogers to accept the accords, assuming we can get Ross out of the way?”

“You mean besides him personally shoving every council member and high-level administrator into a wall and patting them down for snakes? Hell, I don’t know. We’re still talking past each other on the long term.” He scrubs a hand through his goatee and tries not to sound _too_ bitter. “Really, I’m not the best person to ask, he certainly doesn’t trust _me_. Try Romanoff or Wilson.”

T’Challa nods, and there’s one of his analytical pauses. “What do you think of announcing your survival? Do you want to go home?”

“Certainly not if I’m gonna get chucked right back into the Raft because of Ultron.” Tony shrugs. Feels an odd stab of deja-vu—huddled in a cold mountain cave with the sinking realization that he had nothing. “I wrapped up my business at home. If going back is the right play, I’ll make it, but I’ve got no burning need. No Iron Man is really the only drawback right now.” It’s probably not true, but he wants it to be.

“Very well.” There’s a faint chime of T’Challa’s watch, no doubt about the time. “If there is nothing else…?”

“Nah, I’m good.” Tony floats to his feet with relief, and T’Challa follows suit.

“Thank you for your honesty, Mr. Stark,” he says, offering his hand.

Tony shakes. “Thank you for the shiny toys, your majesty.”

“Please, call me T’Challa.”

 _Goddammit_ , Tony thinks. _I like him_.

 

* * *

 

Tony, naturally, beelines for the lab.

It’s more-or-less in another building, through a skytube with a magnificent view, and is, not surprisingly, candyland. Not _his_ candyland, but Tony’s a fast learner. He starts from the ground up, testing whatever manual forging equipment he can find, then the automated printers, and when he’s done with that he has a pair of armored gauntlets to shove into a corner and forget about. Then the microchip fabrication, then the toys he hasn’t even seen before. Wakanda’s a generation ahead in holography, he discovers quickly, out of wireframes and interface and into full projections without even the surfaces he’d had to build to support, say, his MIT presentation on BARF. That gets him wondering if he could rebuild BARF here, build a holographic projector right into the headset—would probably have to be a notch bigger than the glasses, but whatever, it would be fun to see how it worked…

It could help Barnes.

Tony freezes wrist-deep in a take-this-apart-to-learn-how-it-works holographic projector for tourists, components scattered across the bench, and shoves it all in a bin, and spins his chair around slowly in silence.

“Irrelevant,” he mutters, and scoots a few benches over to the biggest computer, and cracks his knuckles, and gets to work. If Natasha’s digging up dirt on Ross, he can think of a few apps for that. Got a good look at some of his security, even, when he was sniffing around. Had some ideas of how to crack it before that EM trap went off under him.

He has to start closer to scratch than he’s used to, without his own libraries, and it’s oddly soothing. Like hammering metal over coal. Back to basics. For a few blessed hours—maybe more than a few—he hits flow, his brain teeming with nothing but code, clean, simple. Stop worrying about Pepper and Rhodey. Stop worrying about consequences, and how much of his life he’s destroyed, and punchy conversations with Rogers he can’t even remember, and Barnes, and the helpless knot of bewildered rage and something-else in his gut that he keeps banging his head against because he can’t even tell what he’s feeling anymore. He’s got a way forward, he’s got something good, here in this pile of custom apps and a fresh-printed circuit board.

He also thinks of about four different ways he can streamline BARF to work with a built-in holoprojector.

Three lab chair catnaps, five scattered meals, and an indeterminate amount of time later, he leaves the body of Natasha’s new phone fabricating, and looks around the room for the first time since he’d started coding, and feels that blissful haze of creation fade. Loneliness burns somewhere beneath—it’s silent and empty working without Jarvis or Jocasta or Friday to bounce off, and talking to himself, he’s discovered, doesn’t quite cut it, not like that stops him. And he can’t get BARF out of his head.

“Hell,” he mutters, and drags the bin of holoprojector bits back across the bench, slowly, rattle and scrape.

He tells himself that he’s just caught up in this because he wants something concrete, because coding is all well and good but nothing’s as satisfying as metal under his hands, putting something together and making it _work_ , is there?

Or because he was never really satisfied with BARF, was he, because it had been a very expensive dead end, and some part of him never knew how to quit those, not since that brainwave about palladium ratios in Afghanistan—really, that’s what the Avengers had been, weren’t they, a very expensive dead end that got poached by a rival?

Or because he knows there’s no damn closure he can get as long as Barnes is stuck in a tube—really there’s no damn closure he can get at all, is there, but maybe this way he can pretend, maybe?

Or because he wants to make up for that idle thought about pulling the plug on that tube, that sharp edge in Rogers’ voice, and damn it, shouldn’t he be able to stop caring about what other people think by now, shouldn’t he be able to just be a good person by his own standards and stop trying to prove himself?

Or just because there’s a _problem_ , there’s something broken and snarled, and he’s never been able to resist trying to fix those, has he?

“All right, baby,” he whispers, picking up a thumb-sized emitter and watching it glitter in the bright workbench light. “Tell me all your secrets.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tfw you marathon Agents of SHIELD and abruptly realize that you need to retcon in blanket para registration instead of saving it for a later plot point. Whee.
> 
> Going to aim for an every Sunday update schedule from here on out.

By the time Tony has finished, tested, and documented the BARF Mark II headset, another few days have passed and he’s actually gotten a few solid and only somewhat hideous blocks of sleep. Mostly because he was too tired to remember his dreams. He’s had to do some debugging on Natasha’s phone, too, it’s probably a good thing he didn’t hand it off right away. But all in all, he’s feeling pretty chipper and pleased with himself by the time he figures out how to call her on his tracker-wristband-cum-loaner-phone and leave a message that he has something for her.

_Extraction imminent :)_ is the return text, and sure enough, about twenty minutes later she turns up at his door.

“So hey, remember your spyphone?” Tony calls, dangling the new one out like a cat toy.

“Do I ever, I’m still sad I lost that in DC.” She saunters in like nothing has ever gone wrong between them, which is at least refreshing. “New and improved?”

He keeps dangling. “How the hell did you lose your spyphone anyway? I set it up so you wouldn’t have to burn it, you know.”

She shrugs. “Left it playing a recording of my voice behind a car as a distraction in a firefight so that Barnes blew it to hell instead of me. Asshole owes me a new spyphone. And a second bullet.”

_Second_. He doesn’t even want to know. “Great, and I have to pay up instead of him because he’s in a tube. Good thing I’m so generous, also use safewords.” He tosses; she catches. “Why do we keep him around.”

“Because he’s cute,” she says absentmindedly, which is not the answer he’s looking for, and starts flipping through. “Nice, let’s see how these babies do against Ross’ firewalls.”

“ _Cute._ Like a confused murderous puppy.”

“Exactly. Oo, is this a find-your-armor app?”

“Sure thing. Chances of third-party detection increase with radius, you might want to keep it under a hundred miles, but—”

“That is going to speed this up by about three hundred percent.” She smiles, toothless, satisfied, and dangerous. “Will that be all, Mr. Stark?”

“Not. Quite.” He swallows, pulls over the larger case with the headset. “Give this to Rogers. Manual’s on a flash drive in here, he’ll figure it out. Olive branch.”

She tilts her head and studies him, curious. “Can I peek.” She doesn’t bother to make it a question.

“Are you going to peek anyway if I say no.” Neither does he.

“Who, me?” She gives a one-shoulder shrug.

“Just don’t ask me why I’m being this nice. I don’t have an answer for that.”

“That’s okay. I’ve figured out by now that if you don’t have a lengthy justification for a decision, it might actually be a good one.”

“Oh, I argued with myself for ages before making that, jury’s still out.” The deflection comes easy as breathing, even as he blinks and tries not to meet her eyes. He isn’t sure whether he wants to believe that’s true. Or whether he wants to believe that she knows him better than he knows himself. “So—question,” he blurts, deflecting harder. “Does it wig you out as much as it wigs me out that Ross knew how to make something that could suppress Wanda’s powers?”

“It’s wiggy.” She tucks the phone into a pocket and pulls up an extra chair. “How do you think he could’ve gotten the intelligence to build it?”

Tony holds up two fingers. “Either Captain Paranoia is right and Ross is a snake with connections to Strucker, or he got a line into SI’s secure servers _way_ before he bogarted me. Strucker kept his shit locked down tight, Ultron could maybe technically have randomly leaked it, but he really wasn’t a random leaks kind of guy.”

“That’s what I thought. I’ve been chasing the first theory ever since Berlin. There’s nothing on him in the SHIELD leak or any other Hydra data I have on hand. No money trail that we’ve turned up yet, though we haven’t exhausted our options there.” She pats her hip. “This’ll help. But at this point, my money’s on the second thing.”

“Ugh.” Tony pulls a face. “Snake would be simpler.”

“Hack or mole? You know more about SI’s security than I do.”

Tony leans back in his chair and scrubs his hands over his face. “I did a pretty deep sweep for security leaks after everything went down. Though not. Right away.” Rhodey had been a higher priority. Things with Pepper had gone a whole new kind of pear-shaped. He’d been a wreck. “It’s possible the trail got covered, but unlikely. He’d _want_ a mole, big picture, but whoever it is can’t have earned access to the stuff he really wants yet, otherwise he wouldn’t need to hang on to the armor.”

“He could be just reusing it instead of copying it. A mole could arrange untraceable data leaks easily, too…” Natasha stretches, looking vaguely annoyed. “I can get a secure line to Maria, start digging—”

“Officially she quit, just so you know. Wouldn’t be politic to stick around once the Avengers weren’t private to SI.”

“I know. But she’s still well-placed, and nobody would see her coming. What would Ross want that he can’t get his hands on digitally?”

Tony spins his chair slowly. “The lockbox. Complete specs for every version of Iron Man, including Veronica’s access codes. Plans for the vita-ray machine. A bunch of other IP as a bonus, hell, even fifty million bucks of solid vibranium, Cap’s shield is in there.”

He rattles off the last with a faint gnaw of worry—yet another reason for everyone here to hate him, isn’t it?—but Natasha just laughs softly. “Finding a fence for that would be _such_ a pain.”

Tony stalls out, staring at the wall, and then spins slowly back around, swallows twice, and adds, “This one isn’t common knowledge, don’t spread it around, but…”

“But?”

“Oh, hell.” It’s relevant. If any of them need to know, it’s Natasha, even if she’s a sketchmistress. Maybe she knows already. Christ, he’s been trying not to think about this, he’s built the last three months of his life around trying not to think about this, but… “All right. Easier access to Pepper.”

Natasha’s brow furrows in distaste. “What, you think he’d pull a damsel in distress to lure you out?”

“Maybe, also gross, also good luck to him. No, it’s more.” Then she doesn’t know. Fuck, here goes. “You ever heard of Extremis?”

“Extremis…wasn’t that some think tank working on human enhancement, you shut them down including IP back in ’13?”

“Ya-huh. The Extremis package makes Cap look like a dinosaur who doesn’t even breathe fire or regrow limbs in forty seconds. It was also unstable, needed maintenance injections, and users had a nasty tendency to occasionally vaporize themselves and everything around them at six thousand degrees celsius.”

“That’s just excessive,” Natasha sighs.

“Pepper’s the only surviving Extremis user,” Tony says flatly. “I stabilized her. So if he wants a non-explosive version of one of the most powerful enhancements out there…”

“ _Oh_.” Natasha’s silent for a long moment. “Does Ross know about her, did she register?”

Tony sighs and drops his head into his hands. “She registered. On the principle that secrets will out, and that she’d rather not be looking over her shoulder for it. I didn’t even _know_ , not until I came back from Siberia…”

“Because Ross was Mr. Informative and didn’t mention that the accords covered registration for all enhanced as well as control of the Avengers. _I_ didn’t know that part until later. We were all deliberately kept in the dark.” She’s quiet for a moment, then adds, “Did you fill her in on the risks?”

“You mean the Ross is a sketchy asshole part? Yeah. She thinks toeing the line will protect her.” His throat tightens, and he stares into space to Natasha’s left for a moment, fighting back dread.

“So did you until you visited the Raft.” Natasha shrugs. “It’s a common misconception among civilians.”

Tony blinks and looks back at her. “What, you think I’m a civilian?”

“Relatively. If it makes you feel any better, everyone here except Clint and Bucky are civilians by my count. I learned the hard way to readjust my standards.”

“No, I like it. I’m getting a little tired of people assuming I’m some soldier or super-spy, because I’m really not.” By people he mostly means Rogers, but he so does not want to get into that right now. “What do you mean you learned the hard way?”

She’s silent for a moment, perfectly still and very abstracted. “Bruce and I didn’t work out,” she says, entirely neutral, as if that’s somehow an answer. “Why didn’t you tell us about Pepper?”

Tony laughs bitterly. “Because _she’s_ a civilian. Because she just wants to live her life and _not_ get dragged any further into my superhero bullshit. And then I go sign off on legislation that does just that without even _realizing_.” And puts Peter in a terrible position to boot. He hasn’t dared contact the kid again.

“It would’ve happened even if you’d fought it side by side with Steve, you know. Sometimes letting go of your ego is good for your sanity.”

“What, it’s supposed to help my sanity to think that I’m some helpless bug in a giant machine of international law that’s rolling over everything I know and love and doesn’t care which way I wave my antennae? That is _so_ Russian.”

“Well,” Natasha says with a lopsided smile, and doesn’t even bother finishing the sentence.

“Oh, go play with your spyphone, Comrade Romanoff.”

“All night long.” She tucks the BARF case under her arm and stands. “Oh, I’ve been wondering. Where on earth did you find half that intel you sent us on Ross?”

“I…had a source. Who would probably be in a bad position if people kept pestering her about this stuff.”

Natasha tilts her head. “Hint taken. Who?”

Tony wonders guiltily if he’s breaking some boundary of spy etiquette, but dammit, he’s a civilian and she’s _Natasha_ , she’ll probably figure it out anyway. “Betty Ross. His daughter, estranged by now, and Bruce’s girlfriend when the gamma experiment happened. He told me about her once.”

“Ah,” Natasha breathes. “That’s how he headhunted Bruce in the first place.”

Tony makes some vague noise of confirmation and sinks down in his chair as she heads for the door, gnawing on everything.

“Hey,” he calls, when she’s mostly there.

“Mn?”

“Do you think this’ll work?”

“Which this, T’Challa’s plans for Ross?”

“That this.”

She leans against the door. “No. But a partial success will still help us, and the intel we’re gathering will be valuable for any play. The frustrating thing is that if Ross has a second heart attack and dies in his sleep tomorrow night, it’ll just make things worse. Somebody will replace him, and it’s known that I’m in the wind, so any death will be suspect. And our rep’s bad enough without adding assassination.”

Tony blinks. “You can do that?”

“Heart attack? Trivially if he has a pacemaker.” She shrugs. “Microinjections of air bubbles or clotting agents are also wonderful for this sort of thing.”

“How do you sleep at night,” Tony mutters.

“Creatively.” She studies him for a moment. “Lying low, gathering leverage, and playing defense is the right move right now, even if it’s not what you’re used to, and this—” she pats her hip pocket “—and the information you just gave me will be invaluable. You’re not required to be a solo operative to atone for your sins. Or a martyr. You can’t protect Pepper that way.”

“That was _not_ the point,” Tony grumbles. He isn’t sure whether it’s true. He very much wants it to be true. “Are you managing me.”

She raises her eyebrows, mild. “Would you actually be happier if I didn’t?”

“Yes.”

She stares at him, sphinxlike.

“No.” She keeps staring. It’s the same damn look she used to give him during that brief, painfully-awkward-in-retrospect PA phase. Christ. The Black Widow carrying his watch tray while he was at a _thoroughly_ embarrassing low. “I don’t know. I’m a study in contradictions, you can update your psych profile. Go play with your spyphone.”

“With pleasure, Mr. Stark,” she says, corporate-bland and notably evil. “One other thing: particularly given her situation, are you going to tell Pepper you’re alive?”

Tony stalls out, feels a chill in his gut. The silence is heavy as sin, and he breaks her gaze and furiously beats down the part of himself that wants to say _yes._ God, he misses her. But, but.

“No,” he says, as easily as he can. “It would make her position complicated.”

Natasha’s face is so neutral, so empty, that he can’t even tell whether she’s judging him. “What if she needs backup or extraction?”

Tony hesitates, keeps wrestling with himself. “Can you be a contact without putting yourself in a bad position? You and she had kind of a rapport back in the day.”

Her lips curl in a smile that he can’t read. “Of course. I’ll open a line.”

 

* * *

 

A day passes. Two. The frequency of the Pepper-in-danger nightmare increases. Natasha drops off her pile of widow’s bites and spy gear with little comment— _in case you’re bored_ —and then comes by later with the Falcon wingpack. It’s familiar, in an aching sort of way. Tony fidgets, makes small repairs; he knows the team’s gear as intimately as Iron Man, and it’s tedious and old and all he can do with himself. Hurry up and wait for politics.

Redwing strained an engine flying Peter out a window. She’s flying a touch lopsided, and he straightens her out and buffs her up and spends a solid hour playing with her, sending her through her tightest barrel rolls and loops near the high ceiling, watching her zoom around the lab and scan and analyze and chirp while he makes the slightest tweaks to the HUD in the goggles. It’s good to train AIs.

He’s not allowed at Barton’s weapons, he notices. Or whatever the hell that new guy was wearing, which he is _very_ curious about, but he knows when he’s not wanted. Six or eight years ago he’d probably have tracked it down and grabbed it, six or eight years ago nobody told him what to do, but goddammit, he’s _tired._

Rogers comes by from time to time with news. Thank you so much for making that, he says. Bucky’s awake, he says. We gave your headset a try, Wanda and Natasha think it’ll be really helpful, and thank you again, he says. He’ll have to be up and about for a bit, he says. “Is that going to be a problem?”

Tony spins eighty degrees around in his chair, Redwing belly-up and compiling her upgrades in his lap, to stare at the opposite wall for a long moment, gut cold.

“Tony…”

He spins the rest of the hundred-and-eighty back around and looks up at Rogers—leaning in the door, arms folded, trying very hard to be casual. “I don’t like it. You don’t have to pretend that I have a say in it. And His Royal Catsuit is probably monitoring my every breath and has made it perfectly clear that I’m out on my ass if I hurt him, so yes, I’m going to put on my big boy pants and not make trouble.”

Hundred and eighty back around before he can see Rogers’ reaction, though he hears the sigh. “Tony, it’s a big house. He could stay somewhere else. You have every right to be uncomfortable having him around—”

“Sure, and what,” Tony mutters, staring up at the wall. “This works, you fix him, I assume he’s not planning on repopsicling himself because that would just be pathetic. So we’re in the same place, on the same side, I’m just supposed to pretend he doesn’t exist?”

“All right,” says Rogers, eventually. “I thought you should at least know what’s going on.”

“Yuh-huh.” Tony stays un-spun, with his back to him and one hand on the freshly-polished low-friction airfoil of Redwing’s belly, feeling the slight heat of her processors running fast under silky metal. Waits for the sound of him leaving, which doesn’t come. “So I know,” he adds, as a hint.

“All right,” says Rogers again, and doesn’t sound happy at all, and leaves.

Everybody else seems to be avoiding him. Which is _fine_. It’s not like he wants to see them anyway. The cafeteria closes in the odd hours, he discovers after another day, so he has to go up to the wing the whole crowd’s staying in to raid that kitchen. Which has its own risks. Three am feels pretty safe, and he’s peckish, but at three am he opens the door on Romanoff and bloody _Barnes_ in their underwear with a bottle of vodka, so that’s an unmitigated disaster. He _thinks_ he bails before they notice him? Six am, maybe, even the crazies have to pass out eventually, right?

Six am turns out to be Wilson in baggy shorts and t-shirt, making pancakes. Goddamn perky early-morning military guys. He’s occupied. Staring out the window enjoying the view and tapping his foot as the batter bubbles. Tony attempts to make a stealth raid on the fridge. Grandmother’s footsteps.

He _feels_ grandmother catch his footsteps more than anything else, and jerks his head around to see Wilson doing the same damn thing, all the muscles in his arm cording, and then it’s gone in a split second like it never happened.

“Mornin’. Want some?”

“Nnggmmffh,” says Tony, disgruntled, and tries very hard to relax as quickly as Wilson had. How does he _do_ that?

Wilson just gives him one of those _looks_ of his.

“No,” Tony says eventually. They smell good. Damn it. “I’m allergic.”

“You’re a crappy liar, Stark,” Wilson says, and flips the first pancake. “They’re gluten-free, I’m experimenting with local stuff. Sit down.”

Tony sits, stomach growling in treachery. He isn’t sure when he last ate. Nor how many hours he’s slept of the last twenty-four. Sleeping’s…harder than usual these days.

He stares at Wilson’s thick back, the way he shifts from one foot to another as he cooks and stubs his bare big toe lightly against the clean tile floor, and realizes he hadn’t seen him since the Raft, and swallows, and feels something warm and uncertain in his throat.

“Hey. Rhodey’s—” He can’t exactly say fine, can he? “He’s out of rehab. Back up as War Machine. They, uh. They couldn’t restore his mobility, but he’s a goddamn trooper, he won’t stay down.”

Wilson gives him a quick, unreadable glance over his shoulder. “I saw him on the news.” He hitches open the oven, slides the panful of pancakes into a tray inside, knocks it closed. “Looks like he’s wearing something new and shiny, you make him that?”

“Sure. A couple of developers had been kicking stuff like that around, but I _am_ pretty much the top of the game for powered exoskeletons, it’s literally what I do. The daywear set slots right into War Machine when he suits up.”

Wilson pours the next round of pancakes with an easy flourish and a sizzle. “Sweet. You putting that design into production? There’s a lot of folks out there who could use it.”

“Course. Pepper’s loving it. I even open sourced it, 3D printing’s the next big thing for medical prosthetics.”

Wilson laughs, almost warmly. “Don’t I know it. Now if only the VA would catch on.”

“Give it another few years, you could just stick a printer in the copy room and churn ‘em out. Email Pepper, she’ll make it a foundation.”

“You can email your own girlfriend, Stark.”

At least he doesn’t see the wince. “Nope, too dead.”

“What, you gonna start using that as an excuse for everything now?”

“Is there a point to being in the empty grave club if I can’t?”

That gets him another laugh, and it feels real, actually real, like Wilson isn’t on eggshells around him or secretly despising him even though he has every right to, and Tony actually relaxes until the full pile of pancakes comes up. They’re incredibly fluffy, and have a slight tang to them that makes him think of those amazing styrofoam crepes that come in piles with Ethiopian takeout, and maybe it’s the same thing, he’ll admit he knows jack and shit about African cuisine. The tang goes smashingly with the rich unfiltered cane syrup that Wilson drops on the table along with a jug of orange juice, and for a few golden moments, there are just pancakes.

“Successful experiment?” Wilson asks, loading up a giant forkful like he already knows the answer.

“Yegmph.” The sugar hits the back of his throat like sparks—damn he’d been hungry. Tony feels almost alive, and finishes an entire pancake before even trying to talk. “Okay, I’m—making the rounds, I guess, I’m sorry about landing you in—”

“I know,” Wilson says, flat and firm. “Knew that the moment you visited that shithole.”

Tony makes some nondescript noise, swallows, taken aback. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, “Had they…”

“Of course. You’re not that stupid.” Wilson shrugs, mouth tight. “They didn’t do anything permanent by the time Steve busted me out of there. All a guy can ask.”

“Are you. Okay?”

“I’m still here.” Another shrug. “I made my choices. Wouldn’t make most of them differently, looking back.” Wilson’s mouth twists. “Clearly shouldn’t have told you to go to Siberia alone, but trust was in pretty short supply at that point.”

Tony snorts, bitter. “Majority vote says the right guy won and I didn’t need a larger audience for my little performance, believe me. ‘Sides I probably would’ve gone alone anyway, I was running pretty low on allies.” Would’ve been nice if Natasha had stayed another five minutes. Vision could’ve been handy, maybe, if Vision hadn’t been too busy moping. And if he could’ve trusted him not to turn on Team Nonagenarian for the greater good, that had kind of seriously _not_ been a priority at the time.

“Hn. Well, last part’s your problem.”

“Okay, are you or are you not pissed at me, help me out here, I can’t figure out if this is some sort of passive-aggressive pancake attack.”

“If I was pissed at you, we wouldn’t be talking,” Wilson says, easy and level. “Which is not to say I’m not frustrated with you, but that’s different.”

“How is that supposed to be different.” He can’t manage to make it a question. They’re _obnoxiously_ good pancakes, he’s too busy stuffing them in his face.

Wilson inhales a few big bites, takes a long drink of orange juice. “Long version?” He starts ticking things off on his fingers before Tony can say no. “I think you made a few phenomenally bad political decisions, for sort of understandable reasons, that turned out to be irrelevant. You handed me off to an avowed believer in enhanced interrogation because you were too white and stupid to know what the hell was going on. _And_ you nearly murdered my best friend and now we’re supposed to be cool, so I’m allowed a few passive-aggressive pancakes, there’s precedent. They’re pancakes and nothing meaner because you were played like a fiddle by Ross and Zemo, and I’m not gonna seriously hold that against you now that you’re wising up. And you made a good play, when you found out about Zemo. You turned on a dime and made a good play, and if I didn’t respect that, I’d never’ve told you where Steve was.” Something tightens in his face, and there’s a weight in his voice like Tony’s never heard before. “You and Rhodes got dealt a steaming pile of shit, and I’m sympathetic, I really am. And I feel like crap for my own part in it, and guilt makes me surly, that’s a known bug. So there. Frustrated. But I’ll work with you, because you’re pulling in a decent direction, and I’ll make you pancakes, because I made enough batter for at least six mouths and you’re a mostly decent guy who’s had a shitty week and was clearly about to have something like pop tarts for dinner, and that’s a travesty. I can probably be your friend if you want it, but that’s not my call.” The last with a profoundly calm shrug.

Tony just kind of stares for most of that. “Jesus, Wilson, cook a man real dinner before you talk about that many feelings.”

Wilson grins a lazy, almost sadistic grin. “You asked for it, robot man, you live with it.”

Tony grumbles into a pancake.

The door opens, the door closes. Tony’s got his back to it, and he jolts, and Wilson looks up, growls “Oh no you don’t,” makes a fork catapult, and _wangs_ a pancake off his plate over Tony’s shoulder.

Tony whips his head around to see Barnes, in a rumpled shirt and looking like a zombie, plucking it out of the air. A second before he notices Tony, and his face shutters, and he leaves with eerie, melting speed.

Tony just sort of freezes in place, twisted around in his chair, for a long moment. The bottom’s dropped out of his stomach. Precedent. Hell.

There’s some part of him that wants to get up and follow Barnes, and maybe shove him into a wall and demand—something, he doesn’t even know what anymore. But he’s tired, and a rank and foul coward, and he can _feel_ Wilson’s gaze boring holes into the back of his head, so he just picks up his plate and fork. “Lemme know if you want anything new for your wings,” he mumbles, and leaves without even looking back at him.

 

* * *

 

That day is singularly unproductive, and that evening, as he burrows into spicy goodness at the cafeteria, Tony’s wristband bings. It’s a message from Natasha, in delicate floating hologram display: _Investigating leak. News cycle way out of control. Extraction in place if needed. :(_

There’s a link.

It’s a video. It’s Pepper, and he recognizes her lucky suit in a snap, the one she wears for the _most_ stressful board meetings and news releases —at least as often as she can get away with it, because girl CEOs have to have more than one suit and this is how he knows sexism is alive and well.

She glows ephemeral in holography against the white satin-gloss table, and there’s a grim and focused clench in her jaw, and Tony’s heart turns over in his chest.

_My name is Pepper Potts_ , she says, calm and gracious, voice barely betraying the nerves he can sense in her. _I’m the CEO of Stark Industries, a world leader in consumer technology, clean energy, and medical innovation. In the last year, my company has established three charitable foundations and brought solutions to the global market in dozens of areas, from land mine detection to to sterilization for field surgery, from paraplegia to fungal infections in South American food crops. In my personal life, I’m a patron of the arts, contributing millions a year to museums and art education._

_I’m also an enhanced individual._

Tony feels like he’s been plunged into icewater. He’s vaguely aware that he’s in a crowded room, that even now somebody might be craning their neck to watch this, watch him watch this, watch him blanch and shudder, but he can’t care. Ephemeral Pepper lifts her chin slightly and continues, voice firm.

_I’m speaking to you all now because I want to clear up the rumors that have been flying around. Without facts, we’re lost in scaremongering and paranoia, and that’s not going to help anyone. I’m speaking to you all like this, instead of at a press conference, because I’ve received seventy-six death threats in the last two hours and my security detail does not think it’s safe for me to leave my home._

Tony can feel his hands curling into fists, and he forces his left flat on the table so he has a steady view of the video, of the defiant spark in Pepper’s eyes. _Here are the facts_ , she says. _I’m not an inhuman, or any kind of alien. I was not born with these enhancements, nor were they implanted by Tony Stark. He only modified them after somebody else forced them upon me—irrevocably, dangerously, painfully, and against my will._

She pauses for a moment, for punctuation, and also to swallow hard; he can see the fine lines of her throat working, and aches to stand by her side. She explains the bare bones of the Killian clusterfuck—leaving out his creepy crush on her, he notices, pitching it entirely as his twisted revenge on Tony for standing him up back in Bern. She plays it well: she’s an innocent casualty, Tony’s suffering obscene consequences for an act of petty dickery, Killian’s a raving monster. Tony huddles over with his wrist laid out, food forgotten, mind going in circles. Of course people might think she was one of those inhuman kids. But that _he’d_ done that to her? Life he’s led, he’d thought he’d heard every _possible_ shitty accusation from the press, but man, they’ve found the one that actually hurts. Good for them.

Pepper finishes, and there’s another moment of punctuating silence. _That’s how I came to be what I am today._ The camera pans back a little, showing her perched elegantly in one of her posh cream armchairs in her new penthouse. Homely. Welcoming. Her rigid posture softens just a touch. _But there’s more I want to say. There’s so much talk out there about the dangers of enhanced individuals. As if all of us are loose cannons at best, nuclear bombs at worst, and weapons either way. Believe me, I’ve seen first-hand the terrible damage that can be done by people who misuse their power. But I also know that we are, in the end, just that: people. Some people, like Aldrich Killian, fight for selfish reasons. Some people, like Colonel Rhodes and the Vision, fight to make the world a better place. And some of us don’t want to fight at all._

_I’m a pacifist._ _Violence frightens me, to be honest._ She ducks her head a little, with a slightly sheepish and brilliantly candid smile. _I shriek and cover my ears a lot, it’s not very dignified. I’ve used these powers exactly once, in self-defense, and I’d be glad to never use them again. I’m also legally sworn not to. Yes, I can breathe fire, if I really work at it. It kind of hurts. This is all to say that when Tony stabilized me and I wasn’t a walking bomb anymore, I decided that if I let this_ thing _change my life, who I am and what I value and what I want to do, I’d just be giving Aldrich Killian another chance to rewrite me._ She jerks her chin up now, proud. _And I refuse. So for three years, I lived my life as if it had never happened._

The candid warmth blurs back into her professional voice now—the line between them so thin, so practiced. _Then I heard of the framework set forth by the Sokovia Accords, and yes, I registered. I’d long wondered when and how the existing legal system would catch up to the new powers that are springing up around the world, and I believed that responsible cooperation would be the right answer when it did. I find it highly disturbing, and a profound betrayal of trust, that word of my enhancements reached the public. I was promised my registration would be completely confidential, that I wouldn’t be put in this position._ Her tone’s barely changed, excruciatingly polite, but Tony knows _exactly_ when Pepper Potts is being passive-aggressive, and he hopes Ross or whoever else leaked this shit is squirming in their seat.

_But if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a CEO, it’s that in every trial, there is opportunity. I’ve spent these last six years striving to better this world. To grow my company on the principle that ethical business practices, both internally and externally, are a necessity and not a handicap, and that profit does not require human suffering. To nurture projects that will save and improve lives around the globe. To set an example, personally and in my leadership, that power is not always corrupt. And by and large, my stock figures haven’t disagreed._

There’s a quirk of her mouth, almost a smile, and Tony yearns on his cafeteria bench.

_So here is my opportunity: Let me be an example in this, too. As far as I know, I’m the most publicly visible enhanced individual leading a civilian life. I’d like to think that I’ve proved, time and again, that all I want is to help people, make the world a better place, and continue my quest for the perfect pad thai. I was supposed to meet today with a sixteen-year-old girl from Palestine who’s singlehandedly invented a more efficient form of water recycling than anything on the commercial market. I want to offer her a distribution contract which could increase the availability of affordable clean water in at least sixteen crisis areas around the world, including Flint, Michigan, and let her put herself through university and move her family out of a one-room shack. She’s brilliant and kind and a voice of our future, and right now she’s sitting in a hotel room in a strange country because I had to cancel on her. Tomorrow I have a quarterly meeting with our largest foundation, where I’m going to sign off on my side of a massive green energy project that will reduce emissions by at least fifteen percent in one of the haziest cities in the world, and I can’t even tell you which one until the project is finalized, which it won’t be if I spend my life hiding in my apartment._

_So here it is. My name is Pepper Potts. I’m an enhanced individual, whether I like it or not. And all I want is to go about my business._

Her closing smile, determined, fades into her usual social media icons and copyright nonsense for video statements, as well as a link to the sworn and notarized written version, and then it all winks out of existence, and Tony stares hollowly at an empty stretch of white table for a long, long moment. There’s eyes on him, he can feel it, and eventually he looks up. A few Wakandans, necks craned, who uncrane almost immediately. Barton’s standing by the recycling bins with a half-eaten fruit in hand, statue-still, and Tony jolts at his pale-eyed stare. Just his luck.

“You’re a dick, but I’ll fly your girlfriend out if she needs it,” Barton says finally, with a shrug, and goes back to munching. “Only mistake she’s made is dating you.”

Tony turns his wince into a twist of the mouth that could vaguely pass for a smile. It’s not like he’s wrong. And Natasha wonders why he hasn’t bothered her with news of his continued existence. “Well, she unmade it.”

Barton’s eyebrows go up a centimeter. “Ouch. Well. Good luck to her.”

“Yeah.”

And then Barton’s sauntering out, before Tony can think of anything else to say—not that there _is_ anything else to say. Or do. He may not be a super-spy, but he recognizes lines drawn in the sand. He’s damn proud, really, in a slightly terrified sort of way. She’s gone and made herself a real pain in the ass to disappear, right? There’s plain old toeing the line, and then there’s this? More trouble than she’s worth, he desperately hopes. Tony pulls up the browser app on his wristband, runs a few search, checks hit counts, backlinks. It’s trending. Drawing some hate, but not _only_ hate. She’s—as okay as she can be. Whoever leaked her registration won’t be. Tony will see to that.

“Good luck with all your stuff,” he whispers.

Then he blinks, pulls the video back up, pauses and scrubs with his fingertip in thin air. The pullback, the view of her apartment. There, on a side table, under her _favorite_ Newman piece, in a black column vase. The bouquet he’d sent her. Picked at random. A little wilted, totally clashing, if he’d thought she’d put it _there_ instead of just tossing it, he’d’ve picked something a little nicer, elegant, maybe calla lilies—dear god, no, Mom and Dad’s funeral had been _lousy_ with calla lilies…

He zooms in. Stares. Scrolls around to her face, frozen awkwardly mid-sentence, lips pursed around _loose_. Scrubs randomly and watches her flicker between expressions, syllables. Closes it down with a pang of guilt and pushes off the bench, leaves his half-finished meal for the drones to wrestle with.

No reason he shouldn’t have his own spyphone, after all.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We have finally reached the chapter wherein shit gets real. Please note updated rating and tags if you are sensitive to violence, and keep your hands and feet in the vehicle at all times.

_Made mself a spyphone_ , Tony texts Natasha a few hours later. _Lemme do armor, ur busy, I know wt look fr._

_Sure_ , she replies, after a long pause. _Sending you some router intel. It’s a node the Wakandan secret service uses so traffic doesn’t get backtraced here. Learn it, love it. :)_

He learns it; he loves it. It’s really quite nicely set up. Between that and the runarounds built into the phone itself, he’s pretty confident in his anonymity. More than he had been the first time he’d tried to crack into some of Ross’ files. He thinks.

“Confidence is a random variable,” he mutters as he cracks his knuckles. “Irrelevant.”

Still, he works subtly this time. He can do subtle, he swears. He’s a grown-up futurist playing spy, sometimes subtle is necessary. Besides, this time he has a specific target, which helps. Inventory transfers from the date of his capture on. Can’t be _too_ hard to suck down without anything noticing.

He leaves it downloading, slow and unobtrusive, and stares at the gradually ticking numbers on the screen for a long moment. He’d cracked the Pentagon on a dare in high school. Either Ross has some top-of-the-line security or he’s getting rusty. Or—no. He can’t believe Betty would’ve ratted him out. Impossible. Not if she’d kept Bruce’s secrets for years.

“Top-of-the-line security,” he says firmly, and goes to climb walls. Well, not literally. That gets him worrying about Peter, and _that_ gets him so antsy that he actually ventures into the not-Avengers’ common room, following some subliminal craving for human contact, ready to bail at the first sign of Barnes or Barton or whoever else might be awkward. But the place is empty except for amazing-shrinking-and-also-growing-guy futzing around doing dishes, and the whole wing sounds quiet.

Amazing-shrinking-and-also-growing-guy gives him a look over his shoulder, then double-takes.

“Whoa, you actually exist.”

“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” Tony says, with a shrug, because he _can_. “Where is everybody?”

“I knew _that_ , I just kind of had the impression you’d become one with your robots or something. Uh, they’re in medical, I think? Wanda’s doing a thing with Bucky and some other folks, I don’t really know them well enough to get involved.”

“Wanda’s…” Jeez, hadn’t he built them BARF so that Wanda _didn’t_ have to mess around with their heads? Well, their funeral. “Yeah, not my problem. How exactly did you get involved in this anyway, like generally, ever?”

ASAAGG—terrible acronym, Tony idly considers—shrugs. “I owed Sam a favor. Which is a long and slightly incriminating story, and makes him sound like way more of a dick than he is and possibly also a mob boss, I was also very okay with helping Captain America save the world and I had a lot of reasons to be seriously not okay with the politics.”

Oh, wonderful, another one. “I still have no idea who you are.”

He grabs a towel for his hands and turns, jittering slightly, and doesn’t seem entirely not suspicious. Either of Tony or in general. “Name’s Scott Lang. I’m pretty much nobody.”

“Yuh-huh, you’re nobody who breaks the laws of physics in an entirely new and exciting way. Is it you or the suit?” Right, they hadn’t had any sort of control collar on him like they had on Wanda. “Must be the suit. How’d nobody pull that off?”

“I am really not going to talk about that with you.” He drops the towel on the counter. “Which is not just a you thing, not that I’m not a little dubious about you, but you’re on our side now, so okay. I’m not talking about that with anybody.”

“Proprietary?”

Lang squares his jaw in what he clearly hopes is a manly fashion. “As hell.”

Tony studies him with a slightly bitter smile tugging at his mouth, paces. “Okay, what’s _really_ driving me nuts is the conservation of mass. I generally notice if I’m carrying a person’s weight, and yet. _I’m_ pretty dubious about being on the same team as somebody who’s breaking basic principles like that, that’s worse than Thor.”

Lang holds up a hand with the kneejerk urgency of a nerd with a correction, and Tony abruptly feels at least twenty-five percent more at home. “Uh, it does actually conserve mass, there’s just a—surface tension effect, basically, there’s a moderate degree of quantum levitation created by closely packed molecules which means that there’s very little perceived weight if I’m, say, standing on somebody. Momentum punches through that to various degrees, like you’ll feel it more if I jump up and down, land on you, and so on.”

“But you can interact with things.”

“Oh yeah, obviously. And proportional strength, once I grab something, I can really do some damage. But I’m not _quite_ touching things, really.”

“Okay, I can accept that, congratulations on not breaking universal constants. Sorry about the getting thrown in oceantanamo thing, I really did not think they would go that far when I brought you guys in.”

“Well.” Lang gives a lopsided shrug. “Personally I’d probably give it an overall lower rating than the San Quentin? On account of it was cold and super creepy and there was some awful shit happening to folks, but it wound up being a nice short stay, and hey, no rats, and the food was light years better so. Eh? I think at this point I’ve officially lost control of my life, but that’s not news, mostly I don’t like being this far from Cassie.”

“You are _so_ not the only one,” Tony says, more frank than comforting. It’s almost comforting _him_ to not be the only epic screwup on the team, apparently. Dear god. They’re teammates. More or less. “Who’s Cassie?”

“Uh, my daughter.” Tony stares—this makes two of this crowd with smaller agents, this is just getting _weird_ —and Lang must mistake it for concern, because he blurts, “She’s fine, she lives with her mom and the new husband, I have visitation now which is really nice but still, me being on the run halfway around the world isn’t going to like leave her on the street or anything. She’s fine.” Maybe he needs to reassure himself as much as anyone else. Then he pastes on the proud dad smile. For further reassurance. “She’s seven.”

“Okay. Good.” Tony isn’t sure whether his mild alarm is showing. “Seven is good.”

“…you’re one of those allergic to kids people, aren’t you.”

“Brilliant, quality science, how did you know.” _Normal_ kids, at least. The squirt in Tennessee had been…tolerable. But he’s not about to unpack that to this guy.

“There’s this look,” Lang says, flapping one hand. “Very science.”

“Such deduction.”

“Wow.” Lang laughs, only half nervous now. “Okay, I have now thrown down dank memes with Tony Stark, I can add that to the bucket list. Uh. So did you seriously flip on the crazy UN laws?”

Tony scratches his ear. “Technically not, just on the psychotic nimrod who enforces them.”

“Oh, so you’re only sort of on our side. I mean, I’m down with flipping on the psychotic nimrod, he’s psychotic, but—”

“There are sides now?” Tony grumbles. “I didn’t want there to be sides, did I want there to be sides.”

“You kind of acted like you did, at least from what I saw,” Lang points out helpfully.

Tony narrows his eyes. “What’s your stake in this, anyway?”

“Wwwell.” Lang sticks both hands in his pockets and jitters. “Look, you’re right, I’m not an Avenger, I’m not a career power suit guy, I just. I got into this to help keep this technology out of the hands of the man, and the more I learn about what it can do, the more that’s kind of a priority, okay.”

“I’m Iron Man,” Tony bites out, “I get it. That isn’t what the accords were about.”

“Sure, ‘cause they’re totally not going to whip up excuses to throw us in prison and impound our shit, that is totally not a thing that’s literally happened to both of us—”

“—that’s the psychotic nimrod part—”

“—power corrupts. You give anybody that kind of authority, shit happens—”

“—so we rewrite that part, put in checks. And yeah, power corrupts, what does that say about _us_?”

“Projecting a little, man?” Tony bristles, and holds up a hand, and Lang puffs out a sigh and looks away. “No, no, that wasn’t fair. Power suit time was more redemption than corruption, personally, but that’s just me.” He turns a circle, brittle, as Tony tries _very_ hard not to identify with that statement, and then holds up a hand himself. “Look, I just. Second chances are important? For me, for you, I don’t know the Ultron story, it’s none of my beeswax, but I know you’re not the only one here who’s done some technicolor crap, I mean I’m kind of.” He laughs awkwardly. “Small time next to some folks. Anyway. Big organizations with a lot of power over people don’t give second chances. They just don’t.”

“Okay, I get it, you’re kneejerk antiestablishment and that’s why you get along with Rogers.” Tony sighs and flops down on the living room couch. He is way, way too tired of having this same conversation twenty times.

Lang laughs a little. “Kind of not what you’d expect from Captain America, but yeah, I, uh, haven’t exactly had a good time with the establishment.” He ducks his head and scratches the back of his neck. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to start a fight.”

There’s a bowl of fruit on the coffee table in front of the couch, and Tony grabs one to munch. “Yeah, well, hasn’t stopped any of us before. What _did_ you do.”

“You mean.” He points vaguely at his chest. “You asking for my rap sheet?”

“Sure. C’mon. You know mine.”

“You don’t have a rap sheet, you just—”

“Spent most of my life making shit that kills people?” Tony takes a big bite of his fruit and mumbles around it. “I’m the man, stick it to me.”

“Okay.” He swallows, drifts closer to the couch. “So when Vista was overcharging their customers—”

“That was you? That hacktivism?”

“I would not identify as a hacktivist, I would identify as a cat burglar?”

“Right, so you’re basically hopeless.” Tony can feel a smile tugging. “Do you even realize what you did to Vista’s stock prices, the other CEOs were laughing at them all month.”

Lang ducks his head. “That wasn’t my goal, more of a side benefit, but okay? I’m not exactly, well, okay, maybe I’m sort of proud. Sort of.”

“What, ‘cause it ruined your life? Advance warning, beating up bad guys in power suits will do that even faster.”

“Kinda put that together by now.” He hesitates, eyes flicking between Tony and the wall, and asks, a little slowly, “Why do you still do it?”

Tony makes some muffled noise into his fruit. “‘Cause Iron Man’s awesome?” Finishes the bite. “‘Cause if I don’t, I wind up spending all my time staring into space worrying that if aliens kill us all tomorrow, it’ll be my fault for sleeping on the job, and that ruins my life in different and less exciting ways? ‘Cause I like it, ‘cause I need to _do_ things? I don’t know, why do you do it?”

“Oof, that’s a long. Story.” He shoves his hands in his pockets, brow furrowing. “I…”

There’s something on the floor next to him, and Tony’s eyes skid over it, and when he forces himself to focus, it’s—

—it’s a man with the back of his head blown open. Tony croaks, feels his hand claw white-knuckled at the couch, feels a jolt like an icepick to the brain. Looks away, almost hopes he’s finally just going crazy.

“I, uh,” Lang starts again, and stops.

It’s still there. The light’s dim, faded from Wakandan afternoon sunshine to something cold and dim and gray, splashes of sick yellow. There’s another body, contorted face-up, thoroughly ventilated, assault rifle.

“Wh,” Lang starts yet again. “That is. Not my long story, Jesus fucking Christ, what…?”

There’s no couch, and Tony’s standing, and there’s a cold, cold wind that makes his skin crawl. Something crunches under his foot, and he looks down to see glass, severed fingers, a gun. Gulps and moves his foot rather quickly, but there’s nowhere better to stand. Bloodstained pieces of scribbled paper, torn olive wool, trash and corpses. There’s most of a hot dog lying in a puddle of tacky dried blood, along with a crush of something black and a few syringes, and okay, Tony is never going to eat a hot dog again.

There’s voices, and everything blurs as Tony looks around, and Lang’s fishmouthing over his shoulder. “Uh, your majesty?”

T’Challa, in a dark maroon suit, takes it in with one long blink and an indrawn breath that sounds almost, distantly, on edge. “Mr. Lang, Mr. Stark…I didn’t think you were involved in this.”

They’re not alone. Distances are—strange. Little knot of people standing in a ring of corpses. Wanda, wreathed in feathering curls of red light, and Natasha studying her with a nakedly determined cast to her face that Tony’s rarely seen. Wilson and Rogers standing like wonder twins, big arms at loose attention, jaws tight and looking down at them with earnest focus. Barton hovering next to Wanda, hands in his pockets and rocking onto the balls of his feet. There’s a moment of silence filled mostly by Natasha’s abstracted, slot-eyed intensity, and then she says one word in Russian.

**ж е л а н и е**

It’s a voice from nowhere, five six seven voices from nowhere, and hearing it feels like slamming into a cinderblock wall; it’s in Russian and nonsense and every language at once, and it doesn’t have any meaning, except, except. Tony feels like somebody’s put a knife in his skull, and makes a strangled noise and jerks a hand up to clutch his peach-fuzz.

“What the hell,” Lang squeaks. T’Challa barely flinches, paces straight for Natasha, and she focuses on them with a frown, and then Wanda turns, and her eyes go wide with horror and she claps a hand over her mouth.

“Highness,” Natasha says, inclining her head. “Well, this is already going pear-shaped.”

“How,” Rogers starts, and then he notices Tony, and pales.

“…we’re all in Barnes’ head, aren’t we,” Tony groans. Fuck. Fuck him sideways.

“Put them back,” Barton mutters. “This is going to get out of hand.”

“I…” Wanda’s voice is muffled by her hand, and she slowly peels it away. “I didn’t bring them here. I swear. Not on purpose.”

“Not blaming you,” Wilson says. “Can you pull out, restart clean now that you know this is a risk?”

“I don’t know?” Wanda blurts.

Natasha opens her mouth—

**р ж а в ы й**

It didn’t come from her. The ground quakes.

“Боже мой,” Natasha says instead.

“We’re—we’re in his fear,” Wanda says, voice a little high and frayed. “Once it starts playing out…I’ll try, I’ve never stopped anything like this in the middle. I’m so sorry.”

Barton parks himself in front of Wanda, like he’s shielding her from the rest, shielding her from distractions. Hands on her shoulders. “Just focus, okay?” he murmurs.

“Uh, question?” Lang sticks up his hand. “In case we are stuck, is there a plan, and on a scale of one to ten, how much is this gonna suck?”

“Eleven, probably,” Natasha says, resigned. “We know what part of his mind we need to get to, thanks to Tony.” She spares him a nod. “There’s a key memory, a freight car in 1945. And freight car’s the last word in his trigger sequence. So Wanda focused on that memory as I started the sequence.”

“And now she’s playing stop the world we want to get off,” Tony mutters.

Rogers rounds a few others, quiet despite his bulk, to approach Tony, radiating worry. There’s chatter in the background, there’s Wanda murmuring something inaudible like a mantra, there’s something like lightning crackling in the distance.

“You could have called me if it wasn’t working before going back to the crazy plan,” Tony bites out.

Rogers gives a slight shake of his head. “It froze, we couldn’t move it forward, but it wasn’t the headset. I tested it, it worked fine on me.”

“Huh, weird.”

“Natasha said it’s probably because he doesn’t consciously remember it. His brain’s…not exactly standard issue anymore.”

“Ff. Well. Found your dark side yet?”

“Sure, on a freight car in 1945, I thought you knew me better by now.”

There’s a thick silence between them. The ground heaves, and Tony falters, and Rogers’ big hand catches him by the elbow, and he doesn’t even look like he realized he did it. T’Challa sinks to a crouch and brushes fingertips through the rubble like a caress and murmurs something Tony can’t make out, and he’s pretty sure from the clicks that punctuate it that he wouldn’t have a chance even if he’d spoken up.

“Ow, what the hell?” Lang says, for no apparent reason.

“I’m still not going to kill him in his sleep,” Tony hisses. “Contrary to popular belief, not actually a raving villain here?”

“I know,” Rogers says, low and tight, and swallows. “As we’ve established, I’m paranoid. Why did you build it?”

Tony opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again, and says, hunched and prickly, “I don’t know, it was kind of a weird nuke-grabbing instinct, I get those sometimes.” He’s having trouble taking deep breaths. He literally cannot imagine a place he’d not rather be. _Maybe_ the Raft. “Shit on a stick. Let’s fix this.”

There’s this horrible ache in Tony’s left shoulder. Bone deep, along the outer edge of his shoulderblade, the end of his collarbone. It’s like the time he snapped his wrist during that really ill-advised caper at Baker House junior year, raw bone pain making his gut roil and his knees weak as Rhodey steadied him and yelled for someone to find a phone, and he makes some pathetic whine between clenched teeth. It’s _pointed_ like the broken wrist never was, focused, and something’s vibrating, this sick dentist’s drill whine that’s going to shake him apart—

Somewhere Wanda yelps like something’s hit her, and Tony can’t even see her, but they’re not getting out of this the easy way, are they?

Then he realizes that there are three screws set right through the thickness of his left scapula. Capped and welded. Sparks skittering with the faint smell of burnt blood. Flesh laid open. It’s _cold_ , the air on the red meat of his newly cut-down shoulder. They cauterized the big artery so he wouldn’t bleed out.

He’s paralyzed. Conscious. No painkillers. He can’t even scream. Not even when somebody delicately slides a wire into his axillary nerve and it feels like fire lit all the way to his spine, pure white-hot fire—

**с е м н а д ц а т ь**

He hasn’t eaten in seventeen days.

The cell that they keep him in is full of blinding lights that flicker off for ten seconds every five minutes, back on again fast enough to murder hope. Deafening music, formless, repetitive. He’d stopped being able to recognize it after a few days. Maybe some of it isn’t music, but men talking. Desperate for sleep, he tries to ignore it. Curls against a wall, twitches, wallows in his own filth. Fidgets with the healing flesh round the rim of metal in his—no, not his chest, his left shoulder. Shouldn’t it be his chest? Should it be just a little circle, and not _this_ , not his whole arm, peeling back layers of his own skin in hopes of digging it out? Shouldn’t there be a car battery? It’s there to save his life—right?

Tony sees too-long hair falling into his eyes and thrashes against the wall of his cell and feels blind panic seizing in his chest. This isn’t—he’s not—this isn’t _him_. Right? This isn’t his body, shaking, limbs like lead, far beyond mere gnawing hunger and into some sick and desperate emptiness, weak to his toes, enhanced metabolism burning through every ounce of his strength, down to the fumes. He isn’t—this isn’t real—he isn’t _Barnes._ He’s Tony fucking Stark, he’s in Barnes’ head because Wanda’s doing something crazy, this isn’t _real_ —

The handlers come. The handlers beat down his kitten-weak struggles and drag him down the hall. His arm is deactivated, deadweight of solid metal dragging off the bone screws. He’s naked, he realizes dimly; of course he’s naked, he hasn’t earned clothes, he hasn’t earned food, he hasn’t earned more than a cup a day of water. The handlers don’t talk to him because he’s not a person. Didn’t the music tell him that?

A small man in a bow tie waits for him. A small man in a bow tie is always waiting for him. There is a prisoner, bound and gagged. There is a knife. There is a sausage and a potato. This has happened every once in a while. He doesn’t know how long it’s been, except the small man in the bow tie says that it has been seventeen days. Maybe it’s always been seventeen days. Could have been seventeen years.

He knows what he is expected to do. If he does it, he eats. If he doesn’t, they will spray him down with just enough acid that he will heal most of it in a day, and then dislocate several of his joints, and then electrocute him until he loses consciousness, which takes longer every time.

Steve wouldn’t do it. He’s telling himself that. He can’t tell whether it’s out loud, except it must be, or else the small man in the bow tie knows everything, because he says Steve has left him behind, and this is the price he—Barnes—Tony, he’s Tony, Christ, he’s Tony Stark, he’s Iron Man, he’s not—

Seventeen days for him to pick up a knife in one shaking human hand, and open the prisoner’s carotid artery, just as easy as breaking open the tail of a missile, just as easy as begging for air with water all down his face, and the worst part is the utter, miserable shame of it. He watches from the ceiling, he sees himself—hair in his eyes, naked and stained with filth, no hair at all, one flesh arm, nice brown jacket, two flesh arms—he sees himself become this starving wretch who would murder a helpless innocent for a sausage and a potato, and he deserves everything that happens, just for that, and—

**р а с с в е т**

—he doesn’t know who he is.

There’s a circle of faces, blurry. Everything is too bright. A bank of lights like a flower. It swims, mercury-white. Water dripping down his face. Crystals biting into his skin, melting.

There are hands. Needle. Heat trickling through his veins, and he twitches as his body crackles, thaws. Latex-gloved fingertips prying open his mouth, something hard and blunt jamming into the soft spot under his tongue. He whimpers. He makes some vague attempt to squirm away, a frightened animal on a steel table, but he doesn’t know how, he doesn’t know what he is. There’s some strange urge in the back of his mind— _you have a metal arm, you idiot, come on, fight back, I thought you didn’t want this_ —but Tony Stark isn’t there. Tony Stark doesn’t exist anymore, somebody else doesn’t exist anymore, he’s just. A body.

_…I’m gonna get his baseline. State your name._

Another whimper. Eyes rolling. Somebody pulls the thing back out of his mouth, but even then, he can’t answer.

_Date of birth. Location of birth_.

Nothing. Clouds. Wasn’t he born a few minutes ago, in this cloud of steam from the cold tube? How did he get in there? He can’t…

_Tell us if the following words mean anything to you. Dodgers. Schmidt. Shield. Captain. Azzano. Hydra. Steve. Sergeant. Zola. Howling. Fenhoff. Brooklyn. Freight car._

He stares, eyes rolling. He spasms at the last one, and doesn’t understand why. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. He wants to say he’s sorry, for getting all the answers wrong, but his lips can’t quite form the words.

_All right. Good boy. Clear for stage two._

They pull him up. Door. A chair. Familiar. He doesn’t know how it’s familiar, he doesn’t even know why he was in the tube, but he must have had a life before that, if he knows this chair? It’s a sick kind of knowing. Makes his gut churn. He’s dragging deep, heaving, desperate breaths, on instinct, like they’re the last he’ll ever take, even though he has no idea what the chair is, deeper, deeper—

**п е ч ь**

—his eyes are open, but he can’t see, everything’s sparks and confetti and jagged pieces of concrete ceiling flying by. There’s this deafening noise, endless lightning, a horrible strangled scream that’s maybe coming from him, because every once in a long, long while it stops when his lungs spasm and drag in air as his vision blackens. He isn’t sure whether he has a body. There’s this shuddering, struggling _thing_ underneath him, naked, fingernails clawing on steel; his head is aflame, his skull has turned inside-out, and it’s consuming him. There’s a chunk of his hair caught on the electrodes, and it’s burning, and it stinks. The thick rubber mouthguard tastes skunky. He tries, for paltry split-seconds, to focus on those things, to distract himself from the pain, but he can’t. It’s incinerating every thought that he has, skeet-shooting them down until his mind is blank, consuming fire, white, meaningless. He stretches up to the ceiling. He burns for all eternity.

Two minutes.

It stops. He reels, cotton-headed, gasping for air like a fish, limp against the paddles clamped over his face, the heavy cuffs locked around his wrists. They ask him a question, and he doesn’t even understand the words. They turn it back on again before he can even think of an answer.

Two minutes.

The same question. He’s forgotten it since the last time they asked. They don’t take out the mouthguard. It isn’t about answers. They turn it back on again before he can even think of an answer.

Two minutes.

The same question. He’s forgotten it. He just wants to breathe. He can’t talk, and he’s not allowed to want, but he’d beg, he’d beg for it and be punished for days, just for some air.

Two minutes.

The same question. He’s forgotten it. He’s forgotten what it feels like to breathe. There was something he wanted, so desperately he’d weep and wail, but he’s forgotten what it was.

Two minutes.

The same question. He’s forgotten it. He’s forgotten what it feels like to breathe. The only thing he’s learned is not to cry. It draws sparks. It hurts. He forgot how, forever ago.

Two minutes.

The same question. He’s forgotten what it feels like to breathe. He’s forgotten how to cry. They will do this all day.

Two—

**д е в я т ь**

—nine bullets. Eight in the magazine, one in the chamber. A knife. Basic tac armor, cinched down snug by two handlers, rocking his passive body as they tug it into place. He stands, numb, as they crouch to strap on his kneepads, watching white letters on their black shirts. CIA. He doesn’t know what that is. He didn’t realize he could read.

The training ground is a bamboo stockade, a maze. Clear-cut swatch of jungle, stumps to foul up his boots. Oppressively hot.

Nine targets. Sanction as quietly and efficiently as possible. He suspects, in some dim, aware corner of his brain, that they have a sniper covering him. He’s valuable. No sense in wasting the arm, if nothing else.

The targets are captured enemy soldiers, probably. Or misled and trapped. Still armed, still on their guard, still without fear. Japanese?

Thirty-four minutes. He uses all the bullets. Gets winged. Loses the knife in a mudslop during CQC. Cannot account for all the time, the strange hesitation the first time he sees a target’s skull bloom open from his first bullet, the distant and inexplicable thought that somebody wouldn’t want him to do this. Discovers he’s stronger by far than anyone he’s fighting, that the metal hand can crush bone. Discovers that he knows how to fight, just like he knows how to read, probably better. Discovers that he feels slightly, slightly less numb when he can _do_ something.

It’s messy. It’s long. The handlers list every tactical shortcoming, to the step, and administer corrections. The corrections leave him whimpering and throwing up in the mud, thin spatters of black ooze. They only feed him with tubes. He thinks of a sausage and a potato, then isn’t even sure what they are.

The exercise is repeated until he performs adequately, and then they reward him with a proper shower. Clean, mostly dry, he lists with relief in the shade of a tent. He hadn’t known what color his skin was under all the grime and crusted gore. What relief it was to not stink, or drip, or itch.

The exercise is expanded to different weapons. Different targets. Some of them are not soldiers. Some of them cry. Some of them are American. Some of them beg. There is a handler here who knows how to cause excruciating pain with a cattle prod aimed precisely at nerve clusters. He learns not to hesitate. He learns to clear the stockade in five minutes, four, against twice as many targets. He learns to earn his rewards.

**д о б р о с е р д е ч н ы й**

_This mission is going to be a touch complicated, but I know you can do it. Consider this a trial. Hydra needs you again, and I’m honored to be working with you on this. I’ve studied your work._

Primary target: businessman and pundit, holder of controversial and dangerous sociopolitical opinions. He does not know what those opinions are. He only knows that the target is going to go mad because of them. His suicide note is already written, laid out neatly by the new handler.

The new handler wears a three-piece suit, moves with quiet, affable focus. He’s blond, square-jawed, handsome. Something in him stirs the heart. Feels familiar, warm.

_My name’s Alexander. I want you to know that, because if this goes well, I’m going to be working with you for some time._

He does not understand why the new handler says there are complications. Secondary targets: associates. Primary target must appear to have sanctioned them with the weapon in his nightstand, then committed suicide. He must pull books off of shelves. It must look messy. No traces of third-party involvement. He must wear gloves, must not use his left arm on targets. All targets are civilians. No danger of significant resistance. He has done frame jobs before. It is not complicated.

_This world is falling into chaos, and right here, right now, you’re the only one who can do what needs to be done._

Secondary target: adult female. He shoots her in the leg, beats her, tears the front of her shirt open, strangles her on the kitchen floor.

_It may seem like a small mission, but Hydra will be able to build on what you do tonight._

Secondary target: adolescent male. He’s small, not full grown, and offers resistance until his wrist is broken. His hair falls into his eyes as he struggles. The space between his shoulder blades is narrow. He has grown two hairs upon his chin. They prickle against the barrel of the revolver, disappear when he pulls the trigger.

_This is going to help people make sense of their lives. Help them understand that they need our guidance, our help, so that we can bring order to this world._

Secondary target: juvenile female. She’s in the bathroom at night, getting a drink of water, froze there in fear when she started hearing noises. She comes up to his waist. There’s blood on his hand, and she looks up at him with terribly wide eyes. It is not complicated.

He locks the door. Holds her by the hair as he draws the bath. She begins to cry. It is not complicated.

The new handler—Alexander. He has never known a name in his life. Alexander. There had been something warm and strange in his gut, when he said he admired his work. He did not know what to call it, or whether he’d ever felt it before. It was—good. He is here to do good.

He does not know how much time passes, there in the bathroom. He is prompted for a mission update over coms. He proceeds, unsettled. He wants to see this new handler again. Even if he will be punished for this unaccounted delay. The fine bones of the secondary target’s face crumple easily under his flesh hand. Her hair floats when he puts her in the tub.

_Make us proud, soldier._

**в о з в р а щ е н и е н а р о д и н у**

A coil of red light floats across his vision, and it occurs to him, in a vague, seismic sort of way, that he is Tony Stark, and that he’s having a nightmare, and he tries very hard to wake up, but he can’t. A coil of red light scatters, turns to crystal, turns back, reflects, refracts, there’s a distant, faint, desperate cry of _this is who we are_ , and he stares at this scarlet kaleidoscope in bewilderment. A piece of it flashes, like a mirror, only it doesn’t show Tony Stark at all, it shows some scrawny kid with cheekbones like knives, buried in an overcoat too big for him, scuttling through a peeled and cracked door with a single loaf of bread under his arm, and it takes Tony a long, long moment to recognize him. It shows some scrawny kid with cheekbones like knives that are shattering under a metal fist, over and over, flat on the ground to be beaten to death, only it’s not the ground at all, and it heaves and fractures, and the kid’s falling, a hundred feet into a river, three bullets in him…

Tony chokes, paws at ghost light, keeps trying to wake up. Words _benign_ echo _homecoming_ in his skull, meaningless, dragging him deeper, irresistible. Red mirrors float by. Two men on falcon wings, soaring and weaving through a hail of fire, until the dark one rolls in a swirl of carbon-fiber feathers and flips his guns into his hands and knocks the other guy out of the sky. Barnes himself, broken-backed under the edge of Captain America’s shield, Wilson a shattered wreck beside him.

_Wait_ , the coil of red light whispers, _stop, this isn’t real—no—!_

Pietro Maximoff writhes as red light rips through his body. An older black guy lies with his throat savaged, glasses broken, blood vivid on his crisp white shirt, clawed hands dragging a ring off his finger. Laura Barton has an arrow in her eye, a garrote slices open her husband’s windpipe. Somewhere a little girl, seven, thrashes in a giant red fist, shrieking. _Daddy, daddy, please, no, daddy…_

Pepper’s screaming, Pepper’s screaming and backing through the glittering wreckage of her new apartment, the plush and featureless penthouse she’d gotten after the breakup. There’s nothing of consequence here. She tries not to take work home. She probably barely sleeps here. Floor to ceiling windows shattered. It doesn’t matter. The apartment is empty. Pepper’s stilettos crunch in the glassy carpet, blood dripping down her legs from a dozen tiny cuts. There’s nothing here except a mission. Nobody, no human being, just a weapon, a target. Tony raises his arm, and the repulsors whine, and the blast hits her square in the chest and her designer jacket burns away with a stink of wool and silk and she goes flying out the window and down, down, down…

It hadn’t even occurred to him to do anything else. There was just. The mission—

**о д и н**

He’s alone.

The black road is a long tunnel, the trees a woven roof blurring by, distorted. One thin beam of light from his motorcycle’s headlamp. Engine thrumming between his legs.

Tony knows this road. Tony has always known this road. Tony tries to brake, yank the bike into the woods, turn around, anything.

His hands refuse to move. The tip of his boot guns the engine.

Tony whispers no in the back of his mind, no no no no no, and his lips don’t move, and his breathing is steady, mechanical, because a weapon does not panic. Two targets. They are already dead, simply because he is here; all he has to do is make them stop breathing. Sanction and extract. His mind feels clear, light, methodical, the laser focus of his very best days. He has orders. There’s nothing but the mission.

The banana-yellow trunk of the car comes into view in that thin beam of light, and somewhere, mute and distant, Tony giggles helplessly. Dad’s single ugliest car. He should’ve at least died in something hotter. Goddammit. Dad.

Tony’s left arm smashes into banana fiberglass and sends it veering off the road with a screech, and Tony tries to close his eyes, and he can’t, because a weapon does not look away. Tony’s dreamed of this over and over since Siberia, and this is almost familiar, this is almost like one of those dreams where halfway through he just stops fighting, gives up in despair, because this will happen again, only it’s never been like this, it’s never been _him_ that Dad looks up at in pained and crawling confusion, it’s never been _him_ that hears the croak of Sergeant Barnes through broken jaw as he jangles with deja-vu for a few seconds before shaking it off, irrelevant, it’s never been _him_ that paces around to where Mom gasps in resignation in the passenger’s seat, it’s never been _him_ that spares her one single glance—female, civilian, left leg broken, offering no resistance—before looking away. Scanning for pursuit or witnesses is a higher priority than visual confirmation of an unresisting target. He uses his flesh hand so he can feel when her windpipe cracks. Sanction confirmed. Proceed to extraction—

**г**   
**р**  
**у**  
**з**  
**о**  
**в**  
**о**  
**й**  
**в**  
**а**  
**г**  
**о**  
**н**

There’s a jolt like he’s woken up from a nightmare, and everything is very quiet and vividly real, and Tony can’t move.

For a moment, he thinks it’s over. For a moment, he can’t breathe—he’d be thrashing, he’d be screaming to the heavens that he’s Tony Stark, he’s not, he’s not _that_ , he’s not Barnes, he’s not—Christ, he’d no idea it’d been that bad, no idea, he can hardly think, his chest aches and his face is hot and horror makes his gut churn—

“Eleven,” somebody mutters, probably Wilson. “Only eleven, she says. Fuck you, Romanoff.” Somebody else sobs, very quietly, too high to be a man, and Tony gulps air and stares around at gray broken-glass-and-bodies wreckage, and it’s not over at all, is it, they’re right back where they started. In Barnes’ head. Right, they’re in Barnes’ head. All eight of them, reeling. The somebody’s Wanda, he’s pretty sure, arms flung wide, glowing; she’s a pillar of red light, it welters and swirls and tears stream down her face.

“Wanda. Kiddo.” It’s Barton, his voice thick. “Hold on. You can do this.”

“We’re…close, I think,” she forces out. “I’m…”

“We’ve going to have company,” Natasha says, very quietly.

“I can’t move,” Tony croaks, trying very hard not to hyperventilate. “Why can’t I move.”

“Same boat,” Wilson mutters. “Steve?”

“Can anyone?” Rogers calls, voice shaky. He’s pale, jaw clenched.

There’s a scattered no or two; he recognizes T’Challa’s thick accent. Somebody _is_ hyperventilating, and that’s not helping Tony very much. Natasha narrows her eyes and clenches her jaw and slowly, as if she was moving a mountain, slides one foot forward. Darts one glance over her shoulder—at Barton, Tony thinks, spy code—

There’s a shadow stalking towards them. Black except for the silver arm, red star like blood. Strapped into a mess of tactical gear. Muzzled. Tony can’t even see his eyes clearly. The back of his mind is screaming.

“Bucky,” Rogers murmurs. “It’s me. We don’t have to do this again.”

“Доброе утро, солдат,” Natasha invokes, voice flat as winter.

“Leave,” Barnes says, toneless.

Natasha lifts her chin and digs one heel into the ground. “ _Солдат_.”

_Ready to comply_. That’s all he should say right now. Even Tony knows that, somehow—fuck, he isn’t even sure how. His mind feels blank, whited-out, offline. He’s biting his tongue against it. _Ready to comply_.

“Stop trying,” Barnes says. “ _This_ is what I am.”

He raises his left arm, and there’s a gun in his metal fist—Tony isn’t sure whether it had been there before or not, and he makes some high-pitched whine of panic and tries to move, and can’t, and Barnes’ eyes are staring over the roof of a car—

Barnes raises his left arm and, without looking, without blinking, double-taps Steve Rogers in the head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Russian translations: the scene dividers are, of course, the trigger sequence; Natasha says "my god" early on, and then greets shadow-Bucky with "good morning, soldier."


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Had to take a break for a week due to life, my apologies. Breakups suck.
> 
> Thank you all for comments and kudos and support. I am...not always the best about responding to things, it is a lifelong weakness. But thank you.

“ _Shit_ ,” Wilson barks.

Steve’s head whiplashes, and he staggers, goes down with one choked gasp. He’s limp before he hits the floor. Blood pooling behind his skull in the debris littering the ground. Two tidy bullet holes an inch apart, right between his wide-open glassy eyes.

An arrow buries itself in Barnes’ left shoulder with a _thop_ , just inside the rim of metal, and all hell breaks loose. Tony tries to fall back as Barnes’ gun arm comes around, mechanical and deadly, but he can’t so much as duck his head—he doesn’t know how Barton’s moving enough to fire, and Natasha’s a blur, zagging in to tackle Barnes.

“Steve,” Wilson’s shouting. “ _Steve_!”

“It’s not real,” Wanda says, voice thick. “Sam, we’ll still wake up, no matter…”

“Damn it,” Natasha huffs, a spiral of motion round Barnes’ head before his right hand punches her out of the air. “Clint, careful—”

“—don’t have to tell me twice—” He’s on the move, angling around at range, passing five feet from Tony without sparing him a glance. It’s not even his usual bow he’s drawing, but some bloodstained piece of junk from the floor, and Natasha grits her teeth and snatches up a bowie knife, and Barnes dodges her slash, and gunfire rattles. Wilson, fish in a barrel, lets out a wheezing groan as two shots go through his lungs, topples with blood foaming on his lips. Barton hisses and lets another arrow fly. Tony can feel his heart pounding against his ribs so fast it’s painful, and Barnes has Natasha on the floor, leaves her there to run after Barton. Completely ignores Lang, paralyzed, huddled on his knees.

“There’s no point in fighting,” Wanda shouts. “This is—a wall of fear—we can’t break through just…”

“Sure,” Natasha pants, dragging her feet back under her, sounding more tired than anything else as she wipes blood out of her eyes. “I’m stalling until you figure it out.”

“Mr. Stark.” The voice is low, thickly accented, and it takes a long, long moment for Tony’s rolling eyes to find T’Challa. He’s still crouched where he’d been at the start, fingertips brushing the ground. The tendons are standing out in the backs of his hands, and there’s fine tremors running up his arms, and his face is wet and set in frank horror, but his eyes are burning and his voice, damn him, is steady. “Mr. Stark.”

“Mnh,” Tony croaks.

“I believe this is on you.”

Tony chokes back bile. “Well, what the hell am I supposed to do about it, I don’t even know this guy.”

“A man is the tales he tells himself, and the tales he hears of himself.” Every word is deliberate, even as he strains against the paralysis, sweat beading on his temples. “James’ life says: he is a killer, his humanity is meaningless.” Even as Barnes snatches Natasha out of the air by the throat and flings her down so hard that Tony can hear something crack. “He fears he cannot escape this, nor be anything else, because—”

Tony doesn’t realize why he’s stopped talking until his eyes track down and he sees the blood spreading over his suitjacket, the hole in his tie.

T’Challa slides sideways, down, silent.

Tony grits his teeth and strains with everything he’s got, but he can’t budge. Fucking _Barton_ can, but he’s helpless—not that it helps Barton when Barnes nails him in the gut, and he staggers, groaning.

“Wanda,” Barton grits out, “what the hell are we supposed to do…”

Barnes turns, inevitable, and fires again. Two more bullets, straight at Wanda. She groans with effort as red light flares, shielding herself, so thick she all but disappears in it. And then he’s coming straight for Tony. Barton lunges to distract him hand-to-hand—funny move from a guy who hates him, Tony thinks—and Barton goes down with a knife in the big vein of his arm, dripping blood.

“Don’t you dare,” Lang croaks on his knees, helpless bravado, and Barnes doesn’t even look at him as he shoots, and Lang takes two in the gut and folds over like a puppet.

Tony gulps air into his spasming lungs and feels like he’s trapped in a banana yellow car. Implacable footsteps. Barnes isn’t even in a hurry, just marching, empty-eyed, stride heavy. Right over Wilson’s body.

“Stop,” Tony croaks, because he doesn’t know what else to say. “Fuck, stop!”

Barnes slams into him like a brick wall, knocks him off his feet. He’s nerveless, he can’t move his limp and disobedient body—not that he’d stand a chance if he could. Even the flesh hand, latching around his throat, is strong enough to pick him up bodily, lay him out prone in the rubble. Barnes lands hard on his chest, heavy thighs framing his shoulders, and the barrel of the gun digs into Tony’s temple—

Tony feels like he’s being shoved headfirst through a pane of glass, only it’s a window of memory _—dance hall. France, underground. He’s at the bar, nursing his spirits, watching Steve Rogers miserably fail to flirt with some gorgeous—dear god, that’s Aunt Peggy. Aunt Peggy tapping Rogers on the olive-uniformed pec almost without noticing it, snapping something very British, jerking her chin up. Tony misses her, sudden and sharp and irrational, wishes he’d ever gotten around to visiting her after Dad died, how old would she be? He’s probably missed his chance. He doesn’t know why he’s thinking about this now, except that it’s him and not Barnes and he’s getting pretty desperate to keep that straight, and everything hurts…_

_Laughter at his elbow. “So then I turn the reversion up to eleven and the car floats—”_

_“Sure, for about five seconds, Howard, I was there.”_

_“You? At a science fair, Barnes? Never knew you had it in you.”_

_“Hey, Stark Expo wasn’t just a science fair, it was the sweetest place for dates, had that little train over it and everything…”_

_“Ahaha, see, I built that for enterprising men like us. Even christened it with twins.”_

_“Show-off. So you ever get the flying car working?”_

_“Nah. Hell.” Howard’s staring off into the middle distance suddenly. Maybe the Steve Rogers middle distance, it’s not an unfamiliar look. He’s very drunk. Barnes—Tony—jeez, couldn’t he at least make this a third-person hallucination for once like a normal person?—can smell the booze coming off him, see his head weave. “Every time. Every fucking time. I try to build a car, a survival vest, a fucking light bulb, anything, it blows up in my face. It’s a goddamn curse, I swear to fuck the big guy has it out for me. Only meant to make weapons. Tomorrow I’m back to New Mexico again and—shit, Jesus, moppet, can’t tell you about that.”_

_“You didn’t mess up with Steve.”_

_“Sure.” Howard swallows hard, knocks back the rest of his drink. “But he’s a weapon, we chewed him up and spat him out. Just a—just a self-wielding one. Maybe that’s the best way to go—”_

—Tony’s falling, and smashes through another pane—

_“—video records show several seconds of unguarded hesitation. This is an inexcusable malfunction. The asset will be disciplined before cryostasis. Mission otherwise successful. Confirmed sanction of both targets and retrieval of the finished serum.”_

_A dismissive sigh, long and slow and deep, and Tony feels his blood turn to ice. He’s being Barnes again, could he stop being Barnes for five seconds, especially—here—stripped down and sitting like a puppet with its strings cut, a voiceless half-naked thing with techs and handlers and security buzzing around, too well-trained to be tied down. They haven’t shocked him yet, but it feels like they have: horror of recognition crackling down his spine when he hears that deep sigh, when he smells that cologne, when that man keeps talking._

_“Ahh, don’t make a fuss on my account. It’s not like I don’t understand taking a moment to gloat over the little shit, it’s what I would have done.”_

_He knows that voice. Shit. Shit. He knows that voice. Purring in his ear as that horrible electric whine burned his nerves out and froze him where he sat. Big hand heavy on his shoulder. Tony’s screaming, somewhere, except he’s not, he can’t, he’s falling right through the memory and his mouth is Barnes’ mouth, silent, slack, passive._

_“It’s a shame about Maria.” A pat, a squeeze, release; it rocks Barnes’, Tony’s, resigned body back and forth. “I tried to talk her out of the trip, but she didn’t listen. I would’ve preferred that she lived. She makes Tony so much more manageable.”_

_“No witnesses, sir.”_

_“No, no, I understand. She didn’t listen. No hard feelings. Now we need to talk distribution. Sowing chaos is all well and good, but we won’t get very far if it gets out that your weapons are coming straight from Stark Industries, now will we?”_

_Three seconds of unguarded hesitation. The handlers close in, and one takes Tony’s right hand, the flesh hand. “A weapon that doesn’t fire is no use. You could have been terminated in three seconds. You are not allowed to waste all that Hydra has given you. The familiarity of the target was a delusion. You will be wiped.” The handler takes his pinkie, bend, pop, dislocate, and Tony would scream from the pain, the panic, his hands, he needs those—but his mouth is Barnes’, and Barnes only whines in the back of his throat and looks away. Hand grabbing his chin. “You have to face consequences, soldat.” He watches in silence as they pop out his ring finger, he watches the swelling come up. Heavy footsteps._

_He watches Obadiah Stane pace around the Winter Soldier’s chair, just his broad back and bald head for a moment before he turns, cigar in his teeth, and looks down at him. Abstracted. “Gotta love the arm. Shame it’s not cost effective for the military, they’d lap it up.” Distant satisfaction on his painfully familiar face as Tony’s middle finger pops out of joint—_

—suddenly Tony can move.

On the downside, it’s mostly to freak the fuck out. He thrashes against Barnes’ legs, knocks the gun away, struggles free; the edges of his vision are black, he’s falling, he’s going to die. He clutches his right hand to his chest, whines, he’s nothing without his hands, nothing—it isn’t until he feels those three fingers shaking that he realizes they’re perfectly fine—

“You’re shitting me,” Tony mumbles, between gasps for air. “That’s not real, what’s _that_ supposed to mean—?”

“You were touching his mind,” Wanda says thickly. Tony manages to look up for a moment; she’s still like a statue, coils of red wreathing around her, two bullets hovering an inch from her face. She doesn’t take her eyes off them. Sweat beading on her forehead, tears staining her cheeks. “Through me. Everything you saw—it is his memories, just as they are.”

Tony makes some strangled animal noise and takes stock.

The landscape hasn’t changed; all the bodies are still there. Rogers. Wilson. T’Challa. Barton’s crumpled to his knees, leaning on his borrowed bow, eyes hazed and swaying as he bleeds out. Natasha lies like a rag where Barnes has tossed her. Lang’s fetal around his bullet wounds, and Tony can’t see if he’s breathing.

He hasn’t done enough. He’s never done enough. Couldn’t he have saved them?

Why hasn’t Barnes shot him yet? Tony scrabbles frantically, trying to get his legs under him. The fear’s so thick he’s going to choke on it. Barnes is standing there, gun in his hand, staring right at Tony with those dead eyes over his muzzle.

Tony isn’t even sure how long he squirms there, riding out panic, as Barnes stands like a statue. Like a doll. As if—as if his mission’s done, everybody else neutralized or sanctioned or whatever, and he’s. Waiting for something.

Oh, hell.

Tony drags as deep a breath as he can, and wobbles to his feet, and draws himself up.

“Soldat.”

Silence. Natasha rolls over, very slowly, and mutters _ow_. Somewhere somebody’s throwing up. Lang?

“Ready to comply,” Barnes says, and the language doesn’t matter anymore, and Tony’s blood runs cold.

“That. Really wasn’t supposed to work, sometimes I hate being right. Okay. Stand down.”

Barnes barely reacts, and for a moment, Tony’s gears spin helplessly, but then he holsters the gun, silent. Tony swallows, feels his heart beating a little steadier, finds momentum.

“You’re— _this_ shit is—not needed anymore. Last mission. Last mission _ever_. Anyone tells you otherwise, they’re lying, _they’re_ the problem, don’t listen to them.” He’s making it up as he goes. It’s _terrifying_. He shouldn’t be the one doing this, why the hell is he the one doing this? Natasha would do better. Rogers would do better. Hell, anyone would do better. Okay, maybe not Lang.

Rogers’ eyes are still open, and they track him as he walks, unsteady. Conscious eyes in a corpse’s face, helpless, terrified. Tony’s head spins, and he drags a deep breath, and looks back at Barnes.

Well, that’s what he said he wanted, wasn’t it? Look him in the eye and—make a call. Fate is being _such_ a bitch. Tony almost wants to giggle. Instead he mumbles, “damn it, take that thing off,” and reaches out to claw at the muzzle. Barnes’ hand comes up, automatic, and clicks something behind his head, and it falls.

“Stark,” Barton hisses from somewhere.

“I’m not stupid, Legolas, you don’t have to tell me to be careful.” Tony doesn’t look back at him. Doesn’t look away.

“Do you want to kill me.” There’s no inflection in Barnes’ voice. It isn’t even a question. Just an offer. Matter of fact.

“…no.” It’s weak, and feels like betrayal, but he can’t anymore, he can’t—not after everything he’d just seen—he _can’t_. Blame him. “Shit. No. After what they did—” He grits his teeth against something like a scream and tries to make his voice light. “I already killed Obie, I’m good. Fine.” Two seconds of silence is all it takes for frustration to bubble up like needles under his skin. “What _more_ do you want, dammit? Just _go_ —live your life, have your love-in with Spangles, whatever you fucking well need, why are you _looking_ at me like that? What do you need _me_ for? It’s not like I’m the only person in the world you’ve screwed over, there’s a damn long line—”

Wanda’s saying something, and Tony can’t even bring himself to pay attention.

Then something cracks in Barnes’ face. His eyes slide down, sideways. His jaw clenches, lips tight, like he’s struggling to say something, something he isn’t supposed to say, but he isn’t supposed to hold back either, against the rules—

“You’re here,” he mumbles. “I knew Howard. You’re Steve’s friend, and I ruined that. Can’t stop hurting people. Even…just by existing.”

“Get in line,” Tony bites out, without even thinking.

Barnes’ eyes widen just a touch, and then he looks away.

“You’re doing fine, Stark. You’re doing fine.”

It takes Tony a long moment to realize that it’s Wanda talking. Even with her accent. “Jesus Harriet Christ, Glinda, no pressure. Fuck.” Scrubs a hand through his quarter-inch hair. “ _Fuck_.” Sucks a few quick breaths of cold winter air that stinks of blood. “I don’t blame you,” he says, low and tight, trying to _make_ it true just by saying it. How the hell could he, after everything he’d seen, felt? “There’s nothing to forgive because I don’t blame you. There.”

Barnes looks back at him, wide-eyed, an earnest kicked-puppy bewilderment that makes Tony’s chest tighten.

“At risk of implanting a horrible pun in your psyche,” Tony mutters, “you’re relieved.” No answer, nothing changes. Tony tries again. “No more soldat time, okay.” Nothing, and Tony takes a step forward and grabs him by the shoulders, one hard metal under his hand, and _shakes_. “You’re—you’re a _person_ , damn it, not a weapon, you get to—you get to keep trying, make your own choices.” He can’t help his own bitter laughter now. “Not all it’s cracked up to be, gotta admit, but god knows there’s nothing else we can do.”

Barnes stares back down at him—Christ, he’s tall—and there’s another moment of terrible silence, and then Tony hears two soft clinks, terribly clear. Two bullets falling to the cracked pavement. Footsteps, and Wanda’s coming up beside him.

“He’s opening up,” she whispers. “I think I can see the way.”

Barnes’ eyes track over to her slowly, and for a moment, Tony’s terrified he’s going to attack her again, blow this last chance—but he doesn’t move. Just studies her, calm, as she raises a hand with a ghostly coil of light.

“Deeper,” she whispers, and his pupils smoke scarlet, and his head sags back a little with a groan of exhaustion.

“Грузовой вагон.” He sounds weary, unruffled, as if the final keystroke of his murderbot activation code is a perfectly normal thing to be saying.

And Wanda _pulls_ —

Tony feels like he’s falling headlong again, only this time he’s rushing _in_ , or maybe Barnes is turning inside out, and he tries pretty hard not to think about either possibility, really, but either way, things get very weird very quickly. He’s falling, they’re all falling, helpless in the dark. There’s nothing, and there’s everything, like every little shiver is rubbing him up against some stray thought: a cooling body underfoot, an assault rifle jammed against his back, a bony shoulderblade and curved spine against his arm, and it’s perfectly normal that he can count every knob of those misaligned vertebrae through that threadbare shirt, three curving to the left and four curving to the right, that’s how Steve’s always been, and Tony shakes his head with a violent shudder.

Rogers and Wilson and T’Challa are moving just fine even as their fatal wounds ooze blood. Natasha’s shaking herself out, Barton’s shrugging it off, Lang’s unfolding. He can _feel_ them more than see them, minds buzzing like computer stations running hot, and he has some brief, vague moment to wonder if that’s what Wanda feels all the time, and then there’s freezing cold wind whipping in his face and a strain in his arms and the clatter of engine and wheels rushing up around him—

Suddenly everything is blue-bright and cold and terribly silent.

It’s like standing in a BARF hologram after it’s played out. Probably the exact one that had sent them all here. Life on pause. Sleek walls, racks of weapons—a depot? No, too narrow. A freight car. Icy sunlight streaming in one side where it’s blasted wide open, a bottomless stretch of snowy peaks. Rogers—a different Rogers, in full antique uniform, flung on his face against a wall. Some armored douchebag dual-wielding phaser machine guns at one end of the car, and Tony eases around his frozen form to get a better view, and—

Barnes. Half-crouched over the shield, long service pistol in one hand.

It takes Tony a long moment to even recognize him. He’s so _young_. Blue wool uniform. Clean-shaven. Proper slicked-back haircut, none of this nineties hobo shit. His face is drawn, his eyes shadowed, but next to the Barnes that Tony’s met in person, he looks downright sane.

“Oh, Buck,” Rogers whispers. The one that’s in all black and looks a million years older than the oversized kid trying to get his feet under him on the floor.

Barnes is frozen along with everything else, and Tony knows somewhere in his gut that the moment he picks up that shield, he’ll be blasted out the side of the train, fall, freeze, break, be taken, be torn apart, be remade, all to cover Rogers for three seconds, there, in that freight car.

Barnes is also standing next to Tony, with the floppy hair and the thousand-yard stare and the little black modesty flap over his metal stump, and Tony does about two double takes. “Okay, less Winter Soldiery, that’s good, right?”

“Hey, asshole,” says Wilson, rather weakly, not unfond. One hand clenched tight over the bullet holes in his ribs, and he’s just watching Rogers, watching him move, sucking deep slow breaths and blowing them out through his mouth, eyes burning.

“Yo,” says Natasha, same as always.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Wanda says, drawing herself up with a deep breath, fistfuls of her skirt in both hands. “We—we’re where we need to be—”

Rogers is halfway through turning when a voice echoes out of nowhere, nasal, with some horribly thick accent, tinny through an old-school radio. “You did this to yourself, Sergeant Barnes.” Rogers goes stiff as a girder, staring at the ceiling in naked alarm. Tony doesn’t recognize the voice at all; but then he does, he does, it was the voice pounding through shock after shock after shock, the voice of the small man in the bow tie, the voice that told him he would be the new fist of Hydra, the _voice_ that said—that said—

“This is the price you paid to save Captain America.”

Rogers goes white.

Wanda breathes something Tony can’t parse, and he’s pretty sure it’s a prayer to some half-dead god. “This is the root of it. This is how they sunk it so deep in his mind. But how can we…?”

Rogers finishes turning, and finds the older Barnes, and his face looks like his heart’s been ripped out. Like nothing Tony’s ever seen from him, and if he was in an asshole mood, he’d savor it, but now it just makes everything more confusing. “Bucky,” he whispers. “I’m not worth it.”

“Like hell you’re not,” Wilson grits out, almost before he’s finished. “You think you can shake that part of him when _Hydra_ couldn’t? You seriously _want_ to?”

“He’ll save you, Steve,” Natasha sighs, folding her arms and leaning against the wall of the train car. “You can’t change history. We just need to loosen whatever tentacles got wrapped around this.”

“Jesus goatfucking Christ on a unicycle bear my soul to heaven,” Lang breathes. He’s huddled on the floor between two weapons crates, arms wrapped around his knees. “It’s not like you could have known, man. I mean, sure, life sucks, and comes down on you for the stupidest shit, but _this…_ you didn’t do anything wrong, you never asked for this.”

T’Challa’s pacing around the car, breathing deep and slow even as blood seeps down his chest. Circling the younger Barnes, crouching a little to study his motionless face. His hands make panther claws, then fists, then slowly relax. “Good deeds do not always come with a terrible price. That is a lie cruel men tell people to keep them from following their hearts.” He shifts on the balls of his feet, looks over his shoulder, up at the other Barnes. “You have a good nature. It is not your fault that this was used.”

“Seconded,” Wilson says, “motion passed. You do what you gotta do, you know I’d’ve done the same. Doesn’t mean you signed up for Hydra.”

“Even when they do,” Tony mutters. “Come with a terrible price, I mean. Doesn’t mean you stop trying. I think.” He can’t even tell whether he’s talking to Barnes or himself. It’s T’Challa who focuses on him, intense gaze turning to Tony, though he doesn’t speak.

“You’re done with it,” Barton says, abrupt. His entire side is soaked with blood to his toes, and there’s a clench in his jaw and a terrible certainty in his voice. “Talk about being finished paying your debt, Hydra’s a worse loan shark than my bank.” He rolls his uninjured shoulder and straightens a little, slowly, and nudges the shield with his toe, and maybe somebody stirs or somebody opens their mouth to say something, but Barton whirls and snaps and everybody goes silent. “It’s arbitrary, okay? There’s no fate, there’s no justice, it’s not about consequences or weaknesses or your own failures, it’s about you drawing the short stick from the asshole with the mind control button who wants to fuck shit up, and anything else is your brain trying to trap you. Or said asshole. And that sucks, and it’s hard to hold onto, but I learned it the hard way. Y’know, I used to think—if I’d been a better agent. If I’d seen him coming. If I’d fought harder to hold onto myself. If I was one of the heavy hitters and not that guy with a goddamn bow and arrow. It was easy to think it was my fault even without anybody saying it. But it isn’t a punishment, Barnes. It’s a hit. You shake it, you patch yourself up, you keep living. And I _know_ , believe me, I know if I’d heard that point blank when I’d first gotten free of Loki, I’d’ve thought it was the stupidest, most condescending hot air. And I know that even though I’ve been there, I’m a tourist compared to you. And—” He swallows, and notices everyone’s looking at him. “Okay, that’s the big stuff, but take it from a guy who’s at least been in the same neighborhood, this has _nothing_ to do with what you did for Cap. That’s a trap.”

“Thank you, Admiral Ackbar,” Tony mutters.

The Barnes standing near Tony shifts, awkward, licks his lips, and finally croaks out, voice hoarse and tired, “Okay, but. You guys…shouldn’t be here.”

“I’m sorry,” Wanda says quietly. “You said yes, when you were awake, but then I pulled in the others without realizing it, and I didn’t know how to stop it…”

“No, I know. I mean, you shouldn’t have had to. See all that.”

Natasha leans her head back a little and says something in Russian, and Barnes sighs, eyes flickering to Lang, then T’Challa, who floats to his feet. To Tony for a bare second, nervously, as if he isn’t sure he’s even allowed to look at him.

“’S not your fault, man,” Lang says, face pretty crumpled.

“Here I thought I was the one who’s shit at accepting help,” Rogers says quietly, and Barnes scoffs, very faint, and sticks his one hand in his pocket.

“Well, I’d shine your shoes, but nobody does that anymore.”

Rogers practically lights up in relief, like there’s some in-joke he wasn’t even sure Barnes’d remembered. “What has this world come to?”

“Everybody wearing undershirts in public?”

“Says the guy in a wife-beater,” Wilson mutters.

Wanda drifts a few steps closer to him. “I think…you have to be the one to start this. Do you know what to do?”

Barnes’ eyebrows knot a little, and he looks down at the shield. “I think so, sure, I just.” A tic in his jaw as he swallows hard. “I don’t know how to do it right.”

Rogers is very still for a moment, and then he lets out a breath and loosens a notch. “Bucky…this isn’t about me. If you pick that up again, it’s for your own sake, right?”

Barnes considers that for a moment, frowning a little. “Is it?”

“Because you don’t want to be used,” Natasha asks, elaborately casual, “or because you don’t want to hurt people?”

His frown drags deeper. “They’re…the same thing?” Natasha keeps staring at him, and he rummages, then adds, “Not hurting people is the important part. I wanted to survive, but…” He’s staring at the floor, not meeting Rogers’ eyes. “I still don’t know if it’s worth it.”

Tony freezes for a moment, stricken, then sticks his hands into his armpits and leans against the phaser-machine-gun-guy, shivering. There’s a bit of a terrible silence, until somebody asks, “What would make it worth it?”

It’s Wilson, mouth tight, and he and Barnes share a long, strange look, until Barnes drops his gaze. “Not doing more harm than good, maybe. I don’t know.” He shrugs, venturing a look back up at Rogers. “Stop fussing, I’m not gonna just die on you. Why do you think I went under in the first place?”

“There is somebody you _so_ need to have a beer with if we ever find him,” Tony mutters under his breath, and fortunately, most of them don’t seem to notice.

Rogers is silent for a long moment, face creased like he’s wrestling with something, and at last he just nods. Barton’s peeled back, leaning against the crates next to Lang, talking so quietly Tony can’t parse it. T’Challa’s silent but intent, naked concern on his face, until he finally says, slow and soft, “The dead have no more choices left.”

Barnes’ eyes widen just a touch, and then he swallows, mouth twitching. “Yeah.”

“Go on,” Tony says. “Go for it.”

Barnes gives him another one of those guilty sideways glances, and then slides a step closer to the shield, to his frozen younger self. Pokes himself in the cheek. “Christ, I was little.”

“You bulked up in Bucharest,” Rogers says, distant and fond. “Good to see.”

“Didn’t even have to join the army for that part. Solid food works wonders.”

Tony tries _very_ hard not to think about that part, and from the looks on a few people’s faces, he’s not the only one. Barnes seems oblivious—probably good, really, he’s clearly not the sort for warm fuzzy fussing—and crouches, and slides his fingers under the edge of the shield, and freezes.

“Steve,” he says, voice very small.

Rogers _melts_ down next to him faster than Tony can follow.

“I’d give my life to save yours in a heartbeat,” Barnes says quietly. “No, don’t make that face, deal with it. You’d do the same damn thing. You _have_.”

“Guess I’m a cat, huh,” Rogers says, and Barnes peels his hand off the shield to boff the side of his head, very gently.

“Stop _testing_ whether you have nine lives, dumbass,” Barnes says. Tony hunches further and kicks himself. The part of himself that burns with envy, the part of himself that misses Rhodey. “But I wouldn’t,” Barnes starts again, and his voice chokes off. “Even if it meant saving you, I couldn’t. Do all that again.”

“It’s okay,” Rogers says, so easily. “You don’t have to.”

Barnes drags one very deep, sudden breath and looks back down at the shield. “Right. I guess that’s the point.”

“Anyway,” Steve says quietly, “I’m not dead. I’m not the price either, Buck, it’s not some just-pick-one racket. I’m right here.”

Barnes takes another few breaths, so deep that they rock him back and forth a little where he’s crouched. Wanda drifts to his other side, and Tony feels like he’s watching them through a window. Private moment. Lang sags, hiding his face in his knees, and Barton goes to hover near him, and Wilson looks like he’s trying _very_ hard to just keep breathing. Natasha sinks to sit cross-legged on the floor, near enough to watch Barnes very intently. T’Challa, in turn, paces silently back to give them space. Closer to Tony.

“Mr. Stark…”

“‘M good,” Tony mumbles, not even bothering to make it sound true. He couldn’t if he tried. His voice is shaking. Natasha scoots closer to the little knot on the floor; they’re talking, quiet. Tony feels superfluous, queasy, looks at T’Challa instead. “You’re awfully calm.”

Some faint expression Tony can’t read at all drags at the royal mouth. “Oh,” T’Challa says, quite slowly. “I am not calm at all.”

“It’s really over?” Barnes asks, raw, not particularly loud, but it drags all their attention back to him anyway.

“Yes,” Wanda says, voice thick. She’s holding out a hand to him, glowing faintly. “You can make it be over.”

“All right,” Barnes whispers, and makes some choked noise, and rubs his hand over his face. He’s not crying, from what Tony can see, not quite, but maybe he would be if they hadn’t burned it out of him along with his memories, his will.

And then he picks up the shield.

There’s a horrible screeching noise, like a thousand vibranium fingernails on a thousand blackboards, and the endless howling screams of a man in an electric chair, and a sudden and thunderous thickness in the air, like the freight car itself is pressing down around them. The voice, the small man with a bow tie, _this is the price you paid to save Captain America_ , stabbing through their skulls, over and over. Barton doubles over clutching at his left ear, and he’s not the only one.

Barnes—the younger Barnes, the frozen Barnes, is moving, _this is the price_ , mouth spreading on an endless scream, _this is the price you paid_ , a black and crackling void, _this is the price you paid to save Captain America_ , and it would be so easy to surrender, Tony feels his legs turning to jelly, his knees hitting the hard metal floor, he can’t keep fighting this, it’s his fault, he brought this on himself—

“Bull _shit_ ,” the real Barnes bites out, and pulls the shield up shining over his heart.


	8. Chapter 8

Red light flares from Wanda’s hands. With a pop of pressure that leaves Tony’s ears ringing, the world shatters, razor-edged bits of blue steel and snow sky, taking the younger Barnes and Rogers with it. And they’re falling headlong again, rushing in, everything turning inside out. Another layer stripped away, laid bare. The naked depths of Barnes’ mind. Wanda knows this, so they all know this. There’s no sight anymore, no images, just a strange, fumbling _sense_ of things. The eight of them, minds buzzing. Barnes, struggling under some terrible weight, so great that it warps the world. Tony has some dim, childish memory of dropping stones on a rubber sheet, black holes in the fabric of space, watching marbles spiral down to nothingness. Один, Barnes is alone, and they fall and fall.

Wanda _growls_ , and the world drips red, and shakes, and comes apart again under eight pairs of grasping hands. Tony scrabbles for purchase amongst fluttering sheets of paper and broken mattress springs, looks over his shoulder, pulls his cap down low. He’s not alone anymore, none of them are—just their mere presence here, reaching for him, shatters the stone, and the rubber sheet snaps free and there’s a _crack crack crack_ of links in some great and terrible chain tearing loose, one after another. Things fall apart. Things fly into their hands, batter them. Barnes screams like his mind’s being ripped up, and everything’s coming at once, and Tony staggers under the weight of—of nonsense, of syllables, of a number—

_Barton turns something upside-down and slams it into the ground with satisfaction, like he’s done this before, like it’s the easiest thing in the world, except it’s also the hardest. Turning all that pain and betrayal into—into this. Doing it right. Laura’s warm smile, her voice murmuring into the night, planning the future they’d carved out by sheer bullheadedness. Children running into his arms, small fingers wrapped around his, children who were ever safe and flourishing. Fresh-cut wood in the afternoon light, food and warmth, solace, a place to come home to._

—семнадцать, what the hell is he supposed to do with that, random number, the least random number, seventh prime, chlorine, number of elementary particles in the standard model—

_Wilson rips open on a battlefield. Like it’s raw, right beneath the surface, inescapable. Deafening fire, stink of blood and piss and shit in the burning sun, death in stony crags. Soldier whimpering beneath him, arm pulverized meat from the elbow down. Cover fire with one hand, duck down just in time to miss a bullet to the head, cinch down the tourniquet with the other. Spine stable, airway clear, hostiles closing. Latching onto the wounded woman and popping the wings open with a growl, heaving skyward, bullet winging his leg, because fuck Pierce’s bullshit, this is what it means—that others may live._

—he’d been seventeen when Mom and Dad—

_Wanda swirls her trembling fingers, and Helen Cho’s mind jars loose from the scepter, and the wheels of a derailed train in Seoul grind to a heart, and Ultron’s mechanical heart crumbles in her hand. Nine bullets in a gun, nine blocks floating at her fingertips, breaking at her will, a weapon forged. Wanda swirls her trembling fingers and bares the trembling of her heart, the sick and creeping guilt, the thin steel thread of will that strings her together, had ever since some long-lost puzzle piece had clicked into place under the sick light of Ultron’s dreams—the power is mine, not theirs, and it is there to help others._

—that won’t help a good goddamn thing—

_Natasha holds burning agony like it’s nothing, easy in her small hands, stands with her toes turned out, shoulders back, neck long, because, she says, it isn’t the furnace that makes you. They will tell you that, when they put you in to melt you down, but it isn’t true. I know you know it isn’t true. It is you that makes yourself when you step out, cooling, annealing, and that form is your own, and the stokers of the furnace cannot take it from you. I know you know. Remember, James._

—seventeen, thirty-four, fifty-one, sixty-eight, third Fermat prime, damn it, Barnes, I’m an engineer, not a mathematician—

_T’Challa holds what he holds with terrible focus, and calm that isn’t calm at all, until he bends his head and, very gently, kisses it, and at his touch, day breaks like it never has before. Like something great and black and terrible has shattered and in pours the tropical sun like a golden hurricane, and warmth that sinks into bones, and the vast and heady sky, and a new day, a new life, hope. Like this is the meaning of the sunrise, and no awakening could be ever be mindless again._

—he’d been thirty-four in Afghanistan—

_Lang’s a wreck, Lang’s crying openly now, and he still reaches out his shaking hands and grabs reckless and fierce for thin air, and there’s a seething rush like a million tiny hands shoving a million globes of oxygen into place in a dancing sea of kaleidoscope and black, and prison bars and gun barrels and that goddamn fucking chair are falling into red sand, rusted and rusted and over and done. Free, he’s free, he’d dance between the atoms for the right to be free._

—he’d been thirty-four when Obadiah happened, seventeen years he’d been carrying all those unanswered questions about his father before he killed the man who’d murdered him without even realizing it, seventeen years Obadiah had waited between murdering Starks—

 _Rogers has the easiest one of all, Rogers just opens his hands, because it doesn’t have to be longing anymore, he’s right here, and it’s love_. _To the end of the line._

—seventeen years before he’d finally come up with an answer to what his father had left behind. The embodiment of the American military-industrial complex and its impact upon society: discuss. God, he always hated essay questions. Scrawl _I am Iron Man_ across the empty space. Shout _I am Iron Man_ to the void. _Just a self-wielding one. Maybe that’s the best way to go._ What is the difference between a weapon and a person: discuss.

 _I am Iron Man_. Tony doesn’t have an answer to that anymore. Rogers and Barnes. Bruce. _Pepper._ The whole world doesn’t have an answer to that anymore, that’s the entire _goddamn_ problem. Tony reels, wrestles with the ever-expanding thorny mess in his hands, slams it down to the ground with prejudice. Because there _has_ to be a difference, otherwise the Winter Soldier is an acceptable outcome, and he doesn’t even know what system he’s a part of anymore or where real accountability could come from, but it has to stop. He’ll fix it. There.

He can’t see anything anymore except sheeting red light, an aurora, glorious, and there’s a murmur of voices, and it’s all fallen apart. Broken words dropping into the scarlet abyss. That had better fucking work after all that, Tony thinks in a distant sort of way, and then they all, they all wake—

Tony wakes up with a jolt, sprawled on the couch in the suite’s living room, half-eaten fruit on the floor a foot from his twitching hand.

He grunts, scrambles to sit, checks the clock on his wristband.

It’s been five minutes.

Five minutes.

Red light drips down his cheeks, tingles, clings to his fingertips as he brushes them over his face, and fades. Saltwater follows it, he’s pretty sure, and _that_ makes him feel sick.

Lang’s a puddle on the floor a few feet away, and he spasms, and yells, and scrambles to his feet and out of the room, dead white.

“Fuck,” Tony whispers, and slowly, slowly pries himself off the couch. Stumbles to the sink, splashes cold water in his face, regrets it. “Okay. Not.”

He can’t think. Almost literally can’t, his mind’s blank, reeling, feels like it’s been shoved through a meat grinder. His throat’s raw and burning, and he goes hunting, after some indeterminate time, for something to wet it. Boxes of red tea, rich coffee, and the idea of brewing something is an insurmountable challenge. About four kinds of weird juice in the fridge. A liquor cabinet.

Tony sputters to a halt with a cold, hollow weight in his gut.

The first glass he pulls out slips from his fumbling fingers and shatters on the polished stone floor, and he just grunts and kicks the worst of it aside. The second sits empty for a few minutes. Water. The tap water’s nice here, pure and bright. He bangs around, pulls up a stool. The contents of the liquor cabinet are largely mysterious, so that stalls him for a long while. Distilled palm wine, white and too-sweet and knock-you-on-your-ass. There’d been that one future-of-Africa conference in Abuja somebody’d dragged him to back in the old days, Obie had pulled this _face_ and refused to touch it, Tony had gotten wasted…

_Obie._

The bottle’s four feet from where he’s sitting, and Tony doesn’t actually remember taking it out and putting it there. He nurses a second glass of water. A third. Other hand in a fist so tight he wonders if his palm’s bleeding.

He can’t get it out of his head. He can’t get _any_ of it out of his head. Slides the glass down the bar. Pulls it back.

At some point, he looks up to see Natasha sitting on the bar, on the far side of the palm wine, checking her phone.

“Jesus!” he snaps, and jolts so hard he knocks over his stool. “ _Why_.”

“Whatcha doing,” she drawls, flicking through a last message and tucking it back into her pocket. She looks—well, there might be a hair of two out of place, but not at all like she’s just been through the same hell he had. Tony abruptly has the weird, nagging worry that it was all some high-grade nightmare and he’s losing his shit over nothing, which is completely irrational because Lang had just looked like death, but it’s not like he can expect all the stupid crap his brain throws up to be rational, now can he?

He drags the stool back up, sits. He’s obscurely grateful, somehow, that she isn’t just freaking out and pouring the bottle down the sink. Waste of fine boiled palm sap, or whatever the stuff is.

“Wrestling with temptation,” he answers finally, frank, because he can’t think of what else to say.

“Who’s winning?”

“I, uh…might have to go for the best two falls out of three.” He drops his head into his hands so he doesn’t have to look at her.

“You can do it,” she says, almost dryly. “So. Stane was Hydra?”

“Grnnghh.” It sinks like a stone. Not some high-grade nightmare. Real life. “What, are you telepathic too now?”

“No.” She shrugs. “I know your file, I know who Obie was. I’d wondered if he’d had a hand in your parents’ death. Thread didn’t go anywhere when I pulled, though that was long before DC. But the Winter Soldier wasn’t exactly a loaner car. Stane would’ve had to have been involved with Hydra to use him.”

Tony groans. “Yeah. I saw memories. Stane was there during…debrief.” He fidgets with the last three fingers of his right hand—they’re fine, they’re totally fine, his hands aren’t fucked up—and if Natasha notices or has any idea why, she doesn’t show it. Doesn’t show much of anything except calmly processing intelligence. It’s strangely reassuring. “Sowing chaos, weapons shipments, he was going on about that.”

“Mm, makes sense. The distribution was pretty wide even for his reach, SHIELD never tracked all the routes after we debriefed you in ’08. Steering Stark Industries that long…” She pouts. “Surprised I didn’t see it earlier.”

“I knew he was dealing under the table, but _why_ , I thought Hydra was all heil order shit…”

“Well, unfortunately they’re not entirely stupid. They learned the hard way during the war that if you’re blatantly fascist, you get a shield to the face. So they spent decades engineering security crises to create a world where there was enough chaos, and chaos with firepower, to justify extreme measures towards defense. The world’s a dirty place and you can’t back down from getting dirty along with it. Hydra sold a lot on that pitch.” So had Obie. So had _Tony_. Natasha shrugs, like she doesn’t even realize. “Hell, it was my leak and I don’t even know how deep the rabbit hole goes yet. How much of the modern intelligence and defense world is built on Hydra’s manipulation.”

Tony feels like some—some _kid_ , some thirty-four-year-old shivering kid in Afghanistan again, clutching a car battery and staring in shock at the Stark Industries crates piled high. “Great. Just great. How much of my life did I spend playing into their hands?”

“Probably a lot,” Natasha says blithely. “Don’t get too twisted up about it, it’s not like you’re alone.”

“Please don’t remind me of how much I identify with bloody _Barnes_ right now, it’s kind of socially awkward.”

Natasha purses her lips and looks at the ceiling. “Sam and Scott.”

“Huh?”

“ _Maybe_ T’Challa. I still don’t have a good read on how much of the accords is in that rabbit hole, or whether he’s enabling by putting forth a moderate position. Probably not, but you never know.”

“Again, huh?”

“Those are the people here who’ve never played into Hydra’s hand.”

Tony’s mouth twists. “Okay, sure, Barnes and Maximoff worked for them, and you’re just kind of generically sketchy, but Barton? _Cap_?”

“SHIELD black ops. Steve spent a year running around with an all-Hydra strike force taking out Nick’s trash, you know. There’s a reason he has trust issues these days.” Her phone bings, and she reads the text and flips it aside without pausing. “And if you’re worried about how much damage you’ve done along the way, Nick’s a lot higher than you. Generically sketchy, I like that, I think it’s my new band name.”

“Congratulations, please tell me Barton’s your kazoo player.”

“Always.”

Tony swallows a few times, mind spinning, and makes out with his water glass for a stretch. “So that. That really happened.”

“Mm. You didn’t just have a weird nightmare, if that’s what you’re asking. We’ll test tomorrow to make sure the trigger sequence is deactivated, nobody’s up for it right now, but Wanda’s pretty hopeful.”

“I know you’re stone cold along with generically sketchy, but Jesus fuck, woman, this is a whole new level, how are you this calm.”

She shrugs. “Бывает.”

“You _know_ I don’t speak Russian.”

“Nothing in there was new. See, Barnes, the vodka, and I get along as well as we do because we have a lot of shared life experience.”

Tony sets down the glass with a clink and looks up at her for a moment. Really, properly looks at her, the delicate lines of her face in the faint glow of her phone. “Didn’t know it was that bad.”

She clicks the phone off, and the light vanishes. “You don’t need to fuss, Tony. I’m all right. Which is why I’m making the rounds. I should check on Scott and T’Challa.” She slides off the bar, lithe.

“Lang went down the hall, he looked seriously freaked out,” Tony mumbles, looking back down at his glass. “I’m not fussing,” he adds, too late.

“Of course not.” She’s quiet for a moment—moving, maybe, but he can’t even hear her footsteps, and he assumes she’s gone until he hears her opening the liquor cabinet and putting the palm wine back. “You did good tonight. You _know_ you don’t need a drink over that.”

He twitches, straightens on his stool, caught entirely by surprise. It’s—true, he realizes, rather slowly. Both parts.

She’s mostly to the door by the time he blurts out, “How. How do you just…keep going, after shit like that, you don’t even look like anything’s ever happened to you.”

She turns back and studies him. “One day at a time. And part of that’s the training. I was made to be highly functional.” She’s silent, and adds eventually, “Life goes on, so you live it, and what you look like and what you feel like are very different. You said Scott’s in the suite somewhere?”

“Yeah. He probably needs you more than I do.”

She nods, and disappears down the hall, and he can hear the faint bing of another text, louder than her footsteps, before it fades. Then silence.

Tony sits and stares out the window, which is an upgrade from staring at his glass. It’s late golden afternoon over the jungle. It seems unreal, like coming out of a jet when you’ve forgotten the local time, like it couldn’t possibly be day, and yet it is. Obie couldn’t possibly have been _that_ , and yet he was.

The long-lost Wakandan cousin of a roomba whirrs out to suck up his shattered glass.

“Hey there.”

It beeps, turns a circle, and slips back into whatever cranny it came from. He’s oddly, unaccountably, disappointed.

Tony splashes the last of his water onto his face and stands on bone-tired legs. _Obie_. Sweet Christ. He’d wondered, during the darker days, if Obadiah’d been behind that car accident, but he’d never really thought—it hadn’t made any sense? How could he have just _been_ like that, all those years raising Tony, biding his time? Hadn’t he been loyal to Howard, hadn’t he wanted Tony to be as good as his father and finally lost patience when he wasn’t, hadn’t that been why…?

He feels like that one time he got caught an earthquake, driving near LA, only the ground buckling under him is his life. Again. Higher on the Richter scale than usual, he thinks, and almost giggles. Obie had killed his father, does that really mean that it isn’t his fault that he’d tried to kill him too? Fucking hell, even after all that he still doesn’t know _why_ …

There’s a shuffle at the door, a bit of a procession, and Tony peeks over. There’s Rogers, with Wanda bundled in his arms like a kitten; she looks pale, exhausted, maybe asleep already. Wilson is hovering, one hand on Rogers’ bicep. Barton’s hovering too, reaching over to brush Wanda’s hair out of her eyes with one hand while texting with the other. No Barnes. Barton notices Tony first, and Tony looks back away from his unreadable stare.

Natasha melts out of the hallway, sans Lang, and there’s a murmur, and she hands something to Barton; Tony can pick out “sleep well, kiddo, you did great” as he fusses over Wanda, and then he’s heading down the hall, Natasha out the front door.

“Wait,” Wanda murmurs, faint and thick, to somebody, and Tony’s mostly busy pretending he’s a statue until, a few rustling footsteps later, he catches her reflection in the glass next to him, and when he turns, her small hand lands on his sleeve. Her eyes are red and shining in a totally mundane way. “Thank you,” she says, and then, “I’m sorry.”

“Uh.” Tony swallows hard, and then whatever he’s going to say next gets _entirely_ derailed by Wanda taking a step closer and hugging him. Just like that. He croaks, and his vague attempt to hug back comes rather too late. She’s smaller than she looks in all her fluttery goth glory, and smells like something crackling and strange that makes his hair stand on end, and he abruptly realizes that nobody’s hugged him since before Pepper broke things off, and this is embarrassing, really, but he doesn’t actually mind, does he?

She looks vaguely worried once she un-hugs, like she’s done something wrong, and Tony dredges up, “you’re confusing, you look like shit, go get some rest,” which is probably not what he’s supposed to say, but fuck it.

Wanda smiles a sad, tight smile. “You too, Stark.”

She retreats, a little huddled, and Tony looks back to the window as they rustle down the hall, ignores their quiet voices. Studies the blurry reflection of the bags under his eyes. It’s. It’s a. Realignment. The world changes, he retunes himself to go with it. He’s done this before. No big deal.

It takes him an embarrassingly long time to notice that there’s another reflection, tall and pale, and when he does, he jolts.

“Shitting hell would you people stop sneaking up on me,” he mutters in a rush.

“Sorry,” Rogers says, slightly hurried. Then stalls out, and there’s the faint sound of fidgeting. “Tony, I. I wasn’t knocked out, not exactly. I saw what you did for Bucky in there.”

“Can we reschedule the I-told-you-so lecture, I am really not in the mood—”

“Thank you,” Rogers says, low and naked, and Tony whips around and looks at him, really looks at him. He’s pale, drawn. Has his own shadows under his debatably perfect eyes. Painfully earnest. His gratitude’s like an oversized and wiggling puppy—or something more slippery, an eel maybe—and Tony stares at him as he wrestles with it.

“Still not a raving villain,” he mutters, gaze sliding sideways. So much for accepting it gracefully.

“Who called you that anyway?” Rogers asks after an awkward pause, brows drawing down.

“Eight-o-clock news? Yeah, I know, it’s irrelevant…oh hell. I’m tired, it’s been a cowpie of a day, you might’ve noticed. We both have massive trust issues, we’ve both kicked each other in the trust nads, truce?”

“Of course,” Rogers says, like he didn’t even need to ask, and folds down into one of the armchairs, like he’s tired too. His legs are too long, and his face disappears behind those huge hands for a moment, and he looks simultaneously outsized and the smallest Tony’s ever seen him.

There’s a long and terribly awkward silence.

“Why aren’t you with the boyfriend anyway?” Tony mumbles.

“He wanted to be alone,” Rogers says into his hands. “I think he’s scared that he hurt us.” He’s stiff for a moment, then adds, more than a little unsure, “Also, for the record, we’re not…currently…ah. Kind of took a break due to brainwashing?”

A break. Well, _some_ biographers just punched the air. It’s almost alarming, really, that he’s too messed up to properly enjoy the distraction. “Eh, worse reasons to take a break. Which sounds like I’m being bitchy, I’m not, it’s.” God, he’s tired. Spilling his stuffing at the seams. So’s Rogers, maybe. “It’s not nobody’s fault, it’s mine, I kept fucking things up for her.”

Rogers makes some vague accepting noise. Neither of them look at each other. “He was getting along fine without me in Bucharest. Not that it’s exactly my fault the world caught up to him, that’s on Zemo, but sometimes…sometimes things keep feeling like they’re your fault, even when they’re not.”

Is he. Actually trying to comfort him? Tony scrambles to change the topic before he thinks about that too much. “Did you know it was that bad?” Blind curiosity. Probably poorly timed blind curiosity, but oh well.

“What…with Hydra?” Rogers is quiet for a moment, voice low. “Not all of it, but…a bunch. Nat did some digging, pulled some strings, after DC. Couldn’t find the whole paper trail, but there was enough to get the idea. I read it over and over, when Sam and I were looking for him.” He ducks his head with a wince. “It was kind of a bad habit.”

“So you’d been chasing him secretly since DC. Two years.” Tony rocks back on his heels a little, far too burned out to muster even frustration. Sinks into another armchair instead. “Surprised Maximoff didn’t dredge _that_ up when she mindfucked us.”

“I think…she went for something hopeless.” Rogers is quiet for long enough that Tony almost asks, or changes the subject, or anything, then adds, in a voice small and a little cracked like Tony’s never heard, “Friday night at the Stork Club. After the war. My first proper date with Peggy. I kinda. Stood her up.”

“One of the ones that’s nice until you wake up, huh,” Tony mumbles. He’s been having more of those these days. Since Pepper’d called a hold. “So basically when you said you were okay, you were lying.”

“I had to be the captain. ‘Sides, it’s not like you can talk.”

Tony stares at him for what feels like a long, long moment, and wonders why it didn’t occur to him for _four years_ that the guy might be faking it as much as a normal person. That all that unflinching Captainly decisiveness isn’t just what he lives and breathes, no squishy human underbelly beneath. For a moment, he’s monstrously glad he took away that shield—now that he’s not hiding all the time, he’s almost likable.

“Good old Aunt Peggy, huh,” he says, pretty much just to make some noise as he rearranges his entire opinion of Steve Rogers, and he hears the man’s breath catch.

“You…knew her?”

Tony shrugs. “Sure, she was a friend of my dad’s. I mean, they worked together, I sort of knew that even if I didn’t know details. She’d come around sometimes, let me show off whatever I was building.” He swallows. “She reached out to me after Dad…” Can’t finish the sentence. Doesn’t need to. Just snorts, bitter as gall. “I was seventeen and full of shit, I never called her back. Saw her in a memory in there, one of Barnes’ memories…” He doesn’t even know what to say anymore.

“Tony,” Rogers says carefully, voice very tight. “She’s gone. She passed a few months ago.”

“Oh, hell.” Tony squeezes his eyes shut for a moment. “I kinda figured, I mean, she must’ve been getting up there, I. Sorry.”

“It was.” He’s silent. Fidgeting. “It was why I wasn’t there, when you were sorting out the Accords before the signing.”

“ _Hell._ ” Tony rubs his forehead. “I wish I’d known.”

“Well,” Rogers sighs, bitter. “I was also full of shit.”

“How was the funeral?”

Rogers hunches a little. “It was okay. Huge. Sam went, Nat dropped by. And Sharon, I don’t think you know Sharon, she spoke.” He looks into the distance with an empty smile. “She had choirboys. Had me down to help carry her out, so I could do that much for her, at least. She’s with her family in London.” He’s silent for a moment. “I’m sorry. I knew she and Howard stayed close, I should’ve realized…”

Tony shrugs with some dismissive noise, slumps further in his armchair. What the hell would he have even asked her? Who was Howard Stark really? Nobody left to answer that question anymore. Except maybe Rogers himself.

“Are you,” Rogers says after another silence, “gonna be okay?”

“Sure, always,” Tony says automatically. More silence. “Look, what else am I gonna be. I don’t know.” He splays his hand over his forehead. “I feel like I’m treading water, I know what I need to do, but not _how_ …” He claws at air, clenches his hand, unclenches. “I can deal with anything if I’ve got that much.”

“Me too,” Rogers says, quiet and frank. “Tony, about Bucky…I owe you.”

Tony waves a hand, blowing it off. “Pff. I mean, yes, you do, I’ll find some really embarrassing way to call it in someday, but I owe you my brain not being in a jar on Ross’ desk. I owe you not taking my head off in Siberia. So whatever.”

Rogers’ eyes widen just a touch, and he stiffens, then blows out air and resettles, elbows on his knees, resting his forehead on the heels of his hands. “I would never have.”

“Yeah, well, you weren’t exactly doing a good job convincing me of that.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Tony feels black guilt bubbling up for a moment, because he’s really not sure he could say the reverse, _god_ he’s not sure, and that would’ve been another cosmic-level fuck-up, wouldn’t it? Being the man who killed Captain America. Twenty-twenty hindsight, now he’d feel bad about Barnes too. “Okay,” he blurts, “okay, no, you know what, _this_ is what you owe me, Rogers.”

Rogers picks his head up, brow furrowed.

“I can’t let the UN keep treating us like weapons, like—assets,” he bites out, and Rogers jaw clenches. “I’ve seen how that ends. I also can’t let us keep running around blowing up whatever we want, that’s not gonna make anyone think any kinder of us. That includes me, for the record,” he adds, a touch defensive. “But if I find a way to fix this damn thing, will you _listen_ to me for five seconds? I _know_ you don’t let anyone tell you what to do, just. Hear me the hell out. Maybe even consider whether it’ll actually kill you to give an inch.”

Rogers doesn’t answer right away, and honestly, that’s pretty okay, Tony isn’t sure he’d believe an easy yes from the man. “That’ll depend upon the way,” he says at last, quietly. “Even if something works for the rest of the team, I may not be able to commit to it personally because of Bucky. And I’m okay with that, I’ll bail for him if I need to if the rest of you guys are safe.”

“I’m not going to call throwing him under the bus a solution,” Tony says, gritting his teeth.

Rogers’ eyes widen just a touch.

“Might want to talk with him before you do that,” comes another voice, and Tony tries very hard not to jump out of his skin for the _third_ time. It’s Wilson, leaning in the doorframe with his arms crossed, a little more hollow-eyed than Tony had ever seen him—not that he can blame him, really. “A bit rude not to.” He notices Tony, jerks his chin at him in greeting, and Tony gives a half-hearted wave.

“He’d tell me not to,” Rogers says.

“Well, think about why,” Wilson says, and wanders towards the stove. “I’m making an industrial pot of that nightmare tea, and you can’t stop me.”

“Don’t wanna,” Rogers says.

“Nightmare tea?” Tony says, pretty much at the same time.

“Something they make here.” Rogers nods vaguely in Wilson’s direction. “He says it helps him sleep better. Doesn’t do anything for me, but that might be my metabolism.”

“I need it, make it,” Tony says promptly. Running water, clink of the kettle. He bites down hard on an unwanted memory of trading breakfast smoothies with Bruce in the old tower, tells himself for the hundredth time that the Avengers had been a doomed experiment, that it wasn’t his fault. Not entirely.

“Tony,” Rogers says. “I’ll listen. I promise.” He lowers his voice a little. “This wouldn’t have been my first choice either. Me ’n Bucky are one thing, and Wanda’s stateless, but Sam, Clint, Scott, they deserve a chance to go home. And we can’t hide behind T’Challa forever, especially now that Buck’s out of the ice.”

“Right,” Tony breathes. “All right. Let’s make it happen, Rogers. Thanks.”

“Thank you.” Rogers pauses, then, almost hesitantly. “And. You can call me Steve. I mean, if you want.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Russian: Один is one and семнадцать is seventeen. Бывает is "it happens," which my Russian ex-housemate would use for everything from dropped food to political assassinations. Not committed by them, of course. As far as I knew.
> 
> Usually when I make little references they're for laughs and I don't bother footnoting them, but I must acknowledge the shout-out to one of my single favorite heart-aching moments from the Vorkosigan series. Wrestling with temptation, best two falls out of three. It's in _Memory_.


	9. Chapter 9

Tony sleeps, deep and dark and almost too tired to dream, only surfacing once in the wolf hours of the night. All out of dreams for the day, he thinks blearily; enough dreams for a lifetime, if he was lucky, in those five minutes of red.

Tony wakes to the thin light of pre-dawn, and stares at the stretch of white ceiling, and it feels more real than anything has in days.

He brushes his teeth, showers with hot-needle spray, shaves. He feels like his brain’s been scrubbed out with a bristle brush and rebooted, isn’t quite sure whether he’s come out the other side of tired or has actually, somehow, found a strange new thread of life. He pulls on another borrowed shirt that isn’t his style and squints at himself in the mirror for a long moment.

“So that happened,” he says eventually. Tugs at a pinch of hair. Maybe it’s getting longer? “Okay, kid. You got work to do.”

He’s ravenous, he realizes, and goes to scavenge at least some fruit or something in the common room, moving as quiet as he can down the hall. Not even Wilson’s up yet, or Rogers. Steve. He doesn’t realize until he has an armful of fruit, ready to decamp to the lab where he can really concentrate, that somebody’s dragged one of the armchairs into a corner, and that somebody’s breathing, very quietly.

It’s Barnes, asleep sitting up. Shoes left in front of the chair, bare feet pulled up, arm wrapped around his knees. Tony twitches once and feels smug about not dropping anything. Wonders how long he’s been parked there, carefully arranged so he can see the whole room and the door and the arch of the hallway leading to the bedrooms, like he’s keeping watch.

If he eats just fruit, he realizes, he’ll be hungry again in like an hour. He adds some crackers. Nuts. It’s easier than thinking about Barnes sleeping beside him, about everything he’d seen in his mind.

By the time he turns around again, Barnes is gone, without a sound, along with his shoes.

Tony pokes the chair on his way out just to make sure he isn’t hallucinating.

It’s still warm.

 

* * *

 

If Ross, Tony contemplates on his way to his lab, had leaked Pepper’s registration himself, for whatever slimy reason, that would be an ace in the hole for the no-confidence vote. Direct violation of his responsibilities. And if it was somebody else, Tony’s just plain going to ruin their life. So really, either way, it’s a good next priority.

He piles his snacks on a table, commandeers a local tablet to start stashing whatever data he needs to stash, finds the holo-display feature, and opens window after window. Almost like home. There’s a stack of shipping manifests waiting on his spyphone, and he blinks at them for a moment, because it doesn’t feel like he downloaded those yesterday, it feels like he downloaded those six years ago. Then he dumps them onto the tablet, throws together a few regexes to wrangle them, finds a Pandora station that isn’t _too_ wretched, cranks it up, and starts munching fruit.

“Okay, next in line,” he declares, sucks pulp off his fingertips, and cracks his knuckles. There’s no sign his sneaky little backdoor into Ross’ shit got noticed, so he starts pulling down whatever he can on the construction of the Raft, because there’s a whole bloodsmear of money and intent behind _that_ thing. It’ll take hours, but whatever, he can leave it ticking as he chases the leak.

It takes only a quick search to learn that Pepper’s name, along with a handful of other unremarkable people unlucky enough to become inhumans, was leaked to the press anonymously by a “concerned citizen,” and only acknowledged as legitimate by the newly-minted American para-reg bureaucracy with that particular form of ringing silence which means it’s true. Tony knows from bullshit PR dances, after all. The paranoia machine took it from there. Tony flicks through article after article, videos playing in other screens, and wonders how in the _hell_ this inhuman contagion had never reached the Avengers’ attention in any significant way. Did Ross have _that_ much control over their intelligence intake? Had _Hill_ kept them away from it? Disturbing thought.

“Still mushrooms, then,” he mutters. Kept in the dark and fed bullshit.

The Wikipedia article on inhumans, he discovers, has a _rollicking_ edit history, and he doesn’t even have popcorn. There are almost a dozen different theories on where those guys are coming from and what they are, all of which have at least one citation-needed floating beside them. The most detailed and coherent version is some grade A conspiracy yarn about big blue aliens experimenting on humans centuries ago, and that leads him to a strange little site with pages of information on some secret inhuman settlement and a buried alien city, and the only trace of identity he can find behind _that_ leads him straight into the deep web and the lingering tendrils of the Rising Tide.

“Huh,” he says to thin air, halfway through another fruit, feeling a faint chill. Fucking _aliens_ , messing with Earth that long ago? It smelled like conspiracy bullshit, but in all fairness, all the other conspiracy bullshit the Rising Tide had leaked back in the SHIELD days had been true, just classified. They’d had _all_ the best Hulk photos.

He can’t even tell if he’s getting distracted. It’s another piece of the same puzzle, and it widens the scope of the thing _obnoxiously_ , but damn it, he’s even more lost. He closes half the windows, reopens them to everything publicly available on the nine council members, and somewhere around then, catches a painfully familiar voice in the youtube chatter.

_—challenges, perhaps no greater or lesser than other ways of life, but unique, and undertaken at great personal risk. I think it would be unkind, perhaps even cruel, to pressure people into it. But the Avengers are…changing._

Tony snaps his teeth together, blows up that window of Vision sitting demurely in some overstuffed armchair to max size, mutes the others, and rewinds. Big Red’s a low-key staid fashion disaster, as usual—there’s a turtleneck, for fuck’s sake—and chatting with some not particularly hostile second-string talk show host Tony only barely recognizes. About rumors that the council is going to start recruiting inhumans to join the Avengers, in a way where Tony is pretty sure _recruit_ means _draft_. Vision is being very delicate about it all, and Tony wonders vaguely if somebody’s been PR coaching him or if he’s just following whatever weird instincts he’s got, as usual. He and the host dance around the concept of increasing the tactical value of the team—Vision says something about about compromise which Tony is pretty sure is a passive-aggressive way of saying _play nice with all the others already, losers_ —and then softball back to lifestyle chatter. _I have become quite taken with this Pokémon Go_ , Vision says, in that particularly earnest tone of voice with which he mimics beloved human concepts like pizza and using doors, and it’s all downhill from there. Tony rocks back in his chair, runs his hands over his face, and snorts.

“Typical, Ross. Won’t compromise with the guys who actually want to put their lives on the line to save the world, then draft whoever you think you can intimidate.”

Vision is apparently Team Instinct, whatever that means. Tony leaves it playing in the background. His voice is soothing if he doesn’t think about it too much. Tony kicks his chair around slowly, scratches his left shoulder even though it doesn’t itch. Once he’s done sucking down the Raft’s history, he can see what Ross has on the inhumans. In the meantime, he pulls up another window and gets down to the illegal shit: cracking into correspondence to identify this _concerned citizen._

“Somebody,” he mutters around a mouthful of nuts that taste like cola, “is going down.”

 

* * *

 

By lunch, he’s ninety-something percent sure his armor’s in a secret military facility in the middle of nowhere in Washington State, maybe more like a hundred percent sure, and he texts that to Natasha over a plate of mysterious spicy goodness in the cafeteria.

_Well, Clint and I will be in the neighborhood, so we’ll check it out. :)_

_Wat?? why??_

_Scott’s missing. Skipped the country. Clint’s pretty sure he’s going to see his daughter in California._

Tony blinks at that for a moment. Then shudders as he thinks of that little girl thrashing in a giant fist somewhere in yesterday’s nightmare parade. He’s not entirely sure he can blame the guy.

_K fair. After Pep’s leek n_

When he gets back to his lab, the case with the new BARF headset is on his chair. Tony frowns, chucks it onto a bench without thinking about it, and digs back in.

An hour later, he’s finally traced the leak down to a hack done by some sketchy-ass deep web mob. Not the Rising Tide, for once. Some group he hadn’t heard of before, calling themselves the Watchdogs. Two hours later, he’s deep in anti-inhuman hatespeak that’s turning his stomach. He can’t tell whether they’re serious about their gun-fetishist murder fantasies or just a pack of trolls, but either way, they fucked with Pepper. Shame Lang isn’t around, he seems like he’d be the sort to enjoy teaming up to shred them. He spends a long lonely time digging around, mining forums and chasing IPs and installing keyloggers. Been a long time since he played this kind of game this seriously, but he’s a fast learner.

By the time he peels himself out of it to vacuum up his remaining snacks, the sun is setting; or at least the automatic lighting of the deep-indoors lab is changing tone, warming for the night. It’s some sort of control-your-circadian-rhythms bullshit that he hasn’t figured out how to override yet, and it makes him lose focus. Losing focus is _bad_ , losing focus might mean thinking for more than five seconds about anything that happened yesterday, and he shudders, and finds different music, and then his eyes fall on the BARF headset.

He pulls it over, opens it, turns it over and over. It should be working. It probably is. Sensible enough that it wouldn’t know how to handle memories as shredded as Barnes’, that wasn’t what he’d built it for. He could test it. Just out of curiosity, really. He could…

He could process some shit. Some important shit.

Tony fidgets with the BARF headset for what feels like a solid hour before finally firing it up. Focusing, fingers flying over holographic displays. Settling it over his temples.

Weaving beams of light paint dark trees, a narrow road, one streetlight. The man underneath, hands planted on his hips, bald pate shining in the night, cigar smoldering. The car; the motorcycle. The veer; the crash. Like some sick goddamn rite with seasonal variations: staticky VHS, his nightmares, Barnes’ eyes, now this.

Obadiah Stane watches. Gives the orders, blow by blow. Let me gloat over the little shit. A shame she had to be involved. Tony stands in the holographic shadows, buzzcut itching under the headset, arms wrapped tight around his chest. Obadiah Stane did this. This is what he needs to see. Barnes hadn’t had a choice. Obie had.

“Not Tony,” Maria Stark breathes, as the Winter Soldier’s hand closes round her throat. “Please. Not our son.”

BARF would—do this sometimes, the first couple of times through a memory-construct. Throw up things Tony couldn’t have predicted, playing with his own mind’s landscape. That was kind of the whole point, after all. Kind of also why he’d named it BARF. He’s rationalizing. He’s telling himself that this is some random error. His belly flutters, hollow; his heart is in his throat. He aches to reach out, pull her free. Only holograms.

“Him too.” Obie plucks the cigar from his mouth, that particular dismissive flick of his wrist, blows smoke. “My goose that laid the golden egg.”

First pass glitch. The scenario shouldn’t interact directly with the user. Tony almost considers turning it off, has his hand on the switch for a moment—but it’s not like this could possibly hurt him. Only holograms.

The Winter Soldier leaves Maria’s body in the passenger seat, and turns, and his empty eyes find Tony. And then he goes still. Tony feels numb, barely breathing—but he’s not afraid. Not one bit.

“I’m alive,” he whispers.

“Yes.” Barnes’ voice is low, numb, hoarse from disuse. There’s a gun right at his hip. He could kill Tony in an instant—only holograms—but he won’t shoot, that isn’t how it went. Obadiah Stane never won that fight. Tony feels utterly calm, looking at him. Just stands ten feet away from a loaded weapon and trusts him. “That’s okay,” Barnes says, and Tony makes some choked noise in the back of his throat.

“Not Tony,” somebody whispers, soft as his mother, but fierce. He feels a strange warmth on his elbow. Long, agile holographic fingers, forming out of nowhere. “Not your son,” says Pepper, chin up, hair shining in the night. “I won’t let him. I promise.”

Obie’s eyes widen.

Obie disappears in a crackle of light and memory, dynamo of an overloading arc reactor lighting up the night and gone.

Tony stops breathing. Reaches out, slow, knowing full well his fingers will pass through nothing, melt into the flickering light of Pepper’s sleeve, white power suit, gold tennis bracelet. But he can’t not.

She’s never met his parents. Dead years before he hired her, never mind fell in love.

Tony just stands there shaking with his hand in hers— _in_ hers—and just aches for her. For what could have been. She and his mom would’ve gotten along like a house on fire, he’d always liked to think that. Warm, practical, artistic. Champion Stark-wranglers, it would’ve been dangerous, really. Dad had never much approved of the one or two girls he’d tried to bring home, and then he’d stopped trying, and then—but even he could see Pepper’s worth, couldn’t he? Let her join—

Join the—

Family.

Tony swallows hard, and rubs at his eyes with his other hand, and realizes he’d’ve married her, married her in a heartbeat, everything, the whole nine yards, if he hadn’t been Iron Man, if he could’ve been Iron Man and still been worthy of her, if, if. Wasn’t that all he’s wanted all along? Family?

It’s just her and Barnes now. The car and its corpses swallowed in darkness. Still as sentries, both of them. BARF can—can only go so far, really, the memory is long gone and this is just. What can’t be. What he’s stuck on.

“Thank you,” he whispers to Pepper. And then stops, because what else can he say? He’s—he’s bad at this. Gratitude. Had he ever thanked her for saving him, that night on the factory roof? Or later, on the tanker, from Killian? He can't remember. Are there even words better than thank you? He loves her so much it hurts, straight-up feels like he’s being torn apart, but that doesn’t matter right now. “Thank you.”

She flickers, and he whips his head around and refuses to watch as she disappears. Just Barnes, then, and he swallows once, and opens his mouth to say, _I still don’t blame you_ , and stops. He’s said that. It’s done.

Instead, he tries, “We’re okay.” It feels heavy on his tongue, hard to form. “I’m okay with you. Hell, right now I just kind of want to help you out.” He can’t even tell how much he believes it until Barnes bows his head, and vanishes, and Tony’s knees give out. He stumbles, lands in a chair, head pounding, chest thick with emotion. BARF hangover, they’re really bad the first time he goes through a memory. He fumbles the hardware off his head, drops it inelegantly on a table so he can scrub his hands over his face—it’s not like he needs this one anymore, really, he doesn’t care, he doesn’t need to go through this memory ten more times until it settles in. Enough is fucking enough.

“Tony,” somebody calls, almost gently, and the first thing he does is yelp, and the second thing he does is grab his head because he thought he’d switched BARF off, and he had, of course he had.

And it’s Steve. Of course it’s Steve. His goddamn luck. Leaning quietly against the wall.

“Grmphlk,” he croaks, and leans back in his chair. “Well. This is awkward.”

Steve lets him stew for a long while, even putters around the room enough to find a glass of water and set it at Tony’s elbow before pulling up a chair and sitting near him. Not quite opposite, perhaps, to make it feel a little less like an interrogation, but near, elbows on his knees, looking almost like an overgrown puppy.

“I’m fine,” Tony mumbles eventually, without looking at him, perfectly aware he doesn’t sound fine at all. He takes a long drink of water, and at least then his voice behaves better. “I’ll be fine. Why are you even here.”

“I…just wanted to check in,” Steve says, shoulders coming up a little. “Bad timing, sorry. I remember there was something in the manual about not interrupting it.”

“Yeah, it’s the _worst_ whiplash.” Might’ve still been better than letting _Steve_ of all people see that.

“I thought it wasn’t supposed to do that,” Steve ventures quietly after a moment. “Bring you into the memory like that.”

“First-pass glitches. It’s still figuring out what’s memory and what’s your brain just—” He makes vague misfire motions near his ear. “Still constructing the thing that could make you feel better.”

“Mm.” Steve nods. Tony drinks more water. Steve at least does him the courtesy of not looking straight at him during all the awkward silence, at least until he asks the question Tony was dreading. “Who was the bald guy?”

Tony swallows, sets aside the empty glass. “Hydra weapons contractor. Organized the hit. I saw the memory when we did the thing.” He’s silent, closing his eyes for a bit against the first tendrils of the hangover migraine. “I do better when I have a name and a face, apparently. Hard to blame some vague snake conspiracy.” A choke of dry laughter. “Easy to blame Obie.”

“Obie—you knew him? A competitor?”

Tony giggles. Straight-up giggles for a moment, breathless and nakedly a little crazy, one hand spidered over his face, and doesn’t look at Steve because he _really_ doesn’t need to see that face of judgement. “Not exactly,” he says, after a moment. “No, nope, not a competitor. Not an external competitor at least.” It’s coming out in one huge vomitous rush, and he can’t stop it, he can barely even keep up. “See, Obadiah Stane was my dad’s best friend and CFO for years. Helped him build out SI into an international giant. Taught me everything I knew about management when I was a grasshopper. Let me cry on his _fucking_ shoulder after Dad died, he was my guardian until I was legal, he ran the company until I turned twenty-one and took the big chair, and then he was _my_ CFO. Took care of me, took care of everything, dealt my weapons under the table to terrorist cells and Sokovian extremists and Hydra and everybody they were pushing along. Until he decides he’s done with me and gives me a cute little video call just before I get into a convoy that he’s hired one of his wackjob clients to blow up in Afghanistan, and I'm pretty sure the only reason I’m still alive is that angry brown people killing Tony Stark made better press than getting disappeared by the Winter Soldier. And once I got back, he played along right up until he could copy my suit and rip the arc reactor out of my chest and try to kill me. So yeah, I sort of knew him. Sort of.”

“Christ, Tony,” Steve whispers into the numb silence when he’s done. Tony can hear him stir, hear him draw breath, and he pulls his hand off his face and forces himself to look at him. He’s radiating concern. Just what Tony’s afraid of.

“So I may,” he bites out urgently, before Steve can say anything else, “have kind of accidentally been Hydra’s chief weapons designer for a while. Like over a decade.”

Steve just raises his eyebrows, gives an infinitesimal shake of his head, and shrugs. “Well, I’m already best friends with their top assassin. Guess I’m just working through the ranks.”

That gets a real laugh out of Tony, not those helpless hysterical giggles from before, and somewhere in there he wonders if that means he and Steve are actually something like friends again, and he feels a little like he’s floating.

“Hey,” Steve says, not unkindly, patting his shoulder. “One of the doctors figured out something that worked pretty well for the BARF hangover, let’s go get you some.”

“BARF hangover,” Tony says, grinning. Steve’s hand is big and warm and he tries not to lean into it, because he _wants_ to be touched, sudden and raw. “Jeez, I’m having flashbacks here. Does this count as you holding my hair while I puke?”

“Probably.” Steve steadies him a little as he heaves to his feet, and that’s too much. That’s it. He sways against him, about fifty percent on purpose—if he’s gonna sway, he might as well sway there—and Steve only hesitates a moment before wrapping one of those long, thick arms around his shoulders. It’s a side hug, there’s plausible deniability, but not as much as there could be, given that Tony’s pretty sure he makes some faintly strangled noise of relief in the back of his throat. Also it lasts longer than a proper side hug, and Tony can’t even care. It’s. Good. Man, apparently all it took to make this team huggy after four years of saving the world and living together was a huge fight and them all becoming criminals together. Tony provisionally blames Wanda.

Steve lets it last and doesn’t seem to care either, until he finally gives a little squeeze-and-release. “Come on, we’ve got a preemptive strike to make.”

“On my head?”

Steve ruffles him. Steve _fucking_ ruffles him—well, more like a buzz, there’s not enough to ruffle yet, and it’s blink-and-miss-it, but Tony doesn’t miss it, Tony is duly alarmed and also wants it to last forever. “On your head.”


	10. Chapter 10

Tony’s started off to his lab the next morning when he comes around a corner, spots somebody sitting on the floor of the hallway, and grinds to a halt with his heart pounding. He twists his mouth in a frown and forces himself closer. So goddamn twitchy these days.

It’s Barnes, in a white tank and brown pants, cross-legged on the floor with one of the long-limbed spotted cats that roam the complex puddled across his lap and purring as he scratches its ear.

He looks up at Tony and goes very still. Opens his mouth, closes it, looks at the floor, and finally says, “Sorry, I got stuck.”

They’re deer in each other’s headlights for a moment. Then Tony mutters, “Yeah, this is awkward. Come on, walk with me.” He jerks his head vaguely down the hall.

Barnes looks a little confused, and tries to bring the cat with him _and_ get up gracefully, which, with only one arm, fails on both points. The cat scampers in a huff. It’s satisfying to watch. But he makes it, and walks with him, radiating nerves, in silence. A long, heavy silence for a long walk. Tony doesn’t try to break it until they reach the lab and he waves at a chair.

“C’mon, have a seat, let me see it.”

Barnes sits sort of automatically, and pops the strap across his chest that holds it in place, and slowly crumples the bit of fabric in his lap. “Stark…”

“Yeah, what,” Tony says, absentmindedly, already dragging up a stool and an imaging scanner. He isn’t entirely sure why he’s doing this. He doesn’t think about it too hard. You break it, you buy it, or at least take a look because you’re bored. “I’m still not gonna kill you, we’ve been over that.”

“I believe you,” Barnes says slowly. “Doesn’t mean you have to talk to me ever again either.”

Tony’s answer comes even slower, because he’s busy staring for a long moment, raking in details. Whoever’d cleaned him up when he’d come here had pulled out any loose bits, filed down the worst sharps, and wiped down the worst charring, but the first inch or two of the mechanism is still a mess, even with the roots and attachment points intact. It’s less like an organic arm than he would’ve expected—there’s a core bone, sure, or at least what’s left of a metal humerus, and wires and conduits running the length of it, but the mechanical action seems to be in rings, manipulating the overlapping plates that make up the surface, amplifying pressure down the length of it. It’s a nice bit of engineering, especially for its era. Tony feels dirty admiring it, and switches on the imaging scanner before muttering, “News briefing, I don’t let go of things easily, didn’t anyone tell you that?”

“I sort of guessed. Still…” He draws a breath, and Tony holds up a hand.

“Ah ah ah, hold still.”

Barnes’ eyes dart sideways at him for a moment, and then he’s eerily motionless. “Would probably be simpler if you did, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” Tony says with a shrug. He’s silent for a moment as he watches the scanner’s progress bar. Then he grits his teeth, because there’s probably no better time to ask this than when Barnes has at least a flimsy reason not to bolt. “Do you. Remember anything else? About Stane?”

“Stane?” Barnes echoes, bewildered, which is kind of anticlimactic.

“Big bald guy, he was in one of the memories I saw in the thing—which, hell, I don’t know how much of that you saw…”

Barnes’ face shutters closed, his mouth dragging down. “Enough to know you all went way too far for me.” There’s a raw silence, and then he adds, almost hesitantly, not looking in his direction, “Cigar. Beard. ’91?”

“Yeah, him.”

Barnes inhales shakily and squints into the middle distance for an alarmingly long time before he finally speaks, voice slow. “He did part of the briefing too, in ’91. Route, identifying details.” Tony feels a chill down his spine—sellout details, more like. “They talked about him…the new contractor. No name, they almost never gave me names. He touched me a lot.” Tony’s skin crawls at that, and he drops his gaze to the progress bar, clenching his jaw. Sometimes he _still_ feels the weight of that arm across his shoulders. “March 14th, 2000. Syria. Target was some imam, he gave the briefing on that. Not debriefing. Talked about weapons with the others a lot. Said it was a shame I couldn’t get an upgrade, but Stark weapons have distinctive ballistics, they gave me the gear I had so it was unspecific as possible.” A pause. “Said something about Ten Rings making good press here on out. That was the last I saw him.”

Tony makes some disgruntled noise. “Figured that’s why he used them, not you, when he tried to off me.”

“Probably good,” Barnes says, contemplative, and has the grace to not elaborate. “I…didn’t realize.”

“Yeah, well, apparently he was a completionist.” Tony bites his lip against bitter irony.

“Was,” Barnes murmurs, face expressionless.

“Was,” Tony says with black satisfaction—and, to his relief, the scanner’s done. He flicks a switch and blows it out, 3D holographic projection, explodable. From the mangled stump to the anchor points screwed into the scapula, filling floor to high ceiling in glowing green light, slowly rotating. Tony takes it in and tries very, very hard not to think about those screws.

“Cool,” Barnes whispers, looking up slowly.

Tony flicks one of the metal plates of his stump with a fingernail. “Yeah, relax, you can move now.”

Barnes looks entranced, and his hand wanders over to fidget with the joint of metal and flesh.

“You ever see it like this?” Tony asks.

“No. Never even saw the specs. I sort of figured out how to oil it on my own after I ran, that was about it.”

Tony jitters to his feet and paces through it, soaking up detail. Especially around the socket; the stump would be cut off for a new and improved model, but there was no changing the biology, and probably only so much he could do about the extant interface without major surgery, and you can’t add bone. Unless you _can_ , the edge of his scapula is a mess of metal anyway…

“Did they reinforce your bones or something? Even past the metal they look extra dense.”

“Sort of?” There’s a pause, and when he looks back at him, Barnes has straightened, pulled his legs up to wrap his arm around them where he sits on the bench. It looks oddly vulnerable, and Tony looks back away. “You get enough microfractures, stress fractures, the body deposits extra calcium while it’s healing.” A pause. “They were probably planning on it, they put goddamn eggshells in any solid food I got.”

“How much did the whole thing weigh?”

“Thirteen…fourteen kilos, maybe?”

Tony pulls a face, finds a stylus to tap against his palm. “That’s, what, almost three times the weight of your real arm? No wonder you got stress fractures.” He waves at Barnes’ right. “Y’know, if I get the exact weight of that one, I could use it as a baseline, build to that, keep you balanced.”

Barnes looks increasingly unsettled, and finally says, hesitantly, “Stark, I’m not looking for a new arm.”

Tony grinds to a halt, staring at him. “O…kay, why the hell not?”

Barnes shrugs. “What good would it do? I can figure out how to get by. It’s not like I’m ever gonna to be able to come out of hiding, even if the rest of you guys sort things out. They’ll come for me someday, and having a weapon welded to my shoulder’ll just make that worse.”

Tony stares at him for a long moment, then starts fidgeting with the stylus again. “Retirement doesn’t tend to last for guys like us, you know.”

“Maybe not you or Steve.” Barnes pauses, drawing breath through his teeth—he’s still nervous as hell, Tony realizes. “I was drafted. Used to be pretty bad at not leaving Steve behind, but…he’s got a lot more backup these days, he’s not alone anymore.”

Shit, it’s so noble and tragic Tony could puke. He leans against a lab bench, teeth clenched. “You realize he’s planning to bail on the Avengers to stick with you if the rest of the team is set.”

“Jesus Mary ’n’ Joseph, _Steve_ ,” Barnes groans, squeezing his eyes shut and bowing his head. “Not if he listens to me for five seconds he won’t.” He looks to one side, and for a moment, his voice is just this broken, private whisper. “Damn idiot. I saved his ass in that freight car, he’d better not waste it.”

_Don’t waste it._

Hell. Tony hasn’t thought of Yinsen in—too long. Too goddamn long. It’s like being punched in the face with an old, bloody cocktail of guilt and determination. He hasn’t—he hasn’t wasted it, has he? He’s kept trying, right?

No. Trying, blind, without thinking through the consequences, that isn’t worth shit. That had gotten him Ultron. But damn it, even when he thought he’d mapped things out, with the Accords…

He’s gotta fix this. Get the team safe, together, so they can protect Earth. He owes Yinsen nothing less.

“If it’s any consolation, Wilson’s with you,” Tony finally says, a little weakly.

“Birdman’s got a good head on his shoulders.” Barnes pauses. “I didn’t say that, we hate each other.”

Tony snorts; that sounds like a very official kind of hatred, the kind stamped and sealed and filed with the Bureau of Eternal Grudges like a marriage certificate. “Sure.” He can’t keep looking at him, looks at the ceiling instead. “Look, I’m trying to fix this whole mess we’re in, whatever I can do. I want getting you in the clear to be a part of it.”

Barnes is silent for so long that Tony pretty much _has_ to look back at him, and mostly he just looks lost and confused. Maybe also like he’s wondering if Tony’s planning to rewrite the laws of physics while he’s at it. Which, sure, if he _has_ to. “Why?” he asks finally.

“Because I wanna.” Because it’s the right thing to do, and he owes the little guy from Gulmira who _died_ for him, but admitting any of that feels like stripping himself naked, and okay, he’s not _that_ comfortable with this guy yet. He’s not comfortable with him at all, but whatever. “Look, we were all there in Siberia trying to save the damn world before it turned out we were being played. If you _could_ , would you keep doing it? Be an Avenger, or whatever we wind up being?”

There’s another one of his immense, bewildered silences, then he finally says, frank, “I don’t know. It’s not exactly likely, you know.”

“Hell if I know,” Tony says with a shrug. “Romanoff’s got a record as bad as yours without even any brainwashing to excuse it, and she’s a founding member.” She’d had SHIELD suppressing her identity and backing her, Tony supposes; they’ve lost all of that. _Still._

“You don’t have to wash a brain first if you start programming that young,” Barnes mutters, and Tony represses a shudder. Barnes is quiet for a moment, slowly smoothing out the black fabric that covered his stump against his knee, looking down at it. “If Steve really needs me, I suppose. Or…any of you. I owe you all.”

Oh, _hell_. Fortunately, Barnes is still looking at his lap, he doesn’t need to notice Tony staring at him. God, he hates feeling like he has things in common with this guy. “But in the meantime you’re going to keep failing to pick up cats one-handed because you’re scared?”

Barnes goes dead still, flicks his eyes up to meet Tony’s without moving. Then looks back down, and away. “Sure. Look how well it went last time.” He swallows. “Besides, it…it doesn’t feel right accepting your charity, yours of all people. You don’t owe me jack.”

Tony rounds a few paces, plops down in his chair, scrubs a hand through his beard, and doesn’t even know what he’s feeling anymore. Barnes, in the thick silence, drapes the black flap back over his stump and threads the strap around his chest; it’s a little slow, but he’s got it, and his nails are long and cracked and one of them catches on his shirt a little, and Tony can’t help but think of Rhodey’s dead stubbornness about picking himself up every time he could.

“All right,” he says. “Here. Let me make you a crappy plastic prosthetic that’s removable and couldn’t hurt a kitten and will let you clip your own nails like a grownup, because if I sit around doing nothing but spy shit and politics all day, my brain might dribble out my ears, and I already rebuilt half of Romanoff’s gear from scratch. My hands are bored, it’s a purely selfish request.”

“…if you’re sure,” Barnes says, sounding more bewildered than anything else. Almost vulnerable.

“I never do anything I’m not sure of that day, arguably that’s one of my problems. Yes, it’s fine, I wanna, now shoo, I need to get shit done.”

“Okay.” Barnes slides off the lab bench he’s perched on. “Thanks,” he says, careful and serious. “For everything.”

“Yeah, yeah, s’what I do,” Tony mumbles, because that is _even_ harder to accept gracefully than Steve’s thank-yous. He spins his chair and grabs his tablet so he doesn’t have to look at him.

There’s a bit of silence that doesn’t sound like a door closing, and he can practically _feel_ Barnes radiating anxiety behind him, until, slightly unsure, he asks, “Stark?”

“Yeah, spit it out, you’re killing me.” He doesn’t look back up at him, already taking notes with finger-swipes on a tablet.

“Who was that spider kid?”

Tony’s hands stutter to a halt, and he swallows hard. “Why.”

There’s enough of a silence that he looks up eventually, and Barnes is leaning with his stump on the doorframe, hand in his pocket, face furrowing. “He…reminded me of Steve. Is he gonna be okay?”

“He…” Tony swallows around a dry mouth. “Yeah, he didn’t get hurt, he’s back to his life.” Whatever degree of life is left to him after everything. “He’s not an Avenger, he’s…local. Small-time. I don’t know where he is with registration, I—I didn’t know, I seriously didn’t know, none of us did. He—doesn’t want his name getting out.”

“Oh—yeah, can’t blame him.” Barnes actually looks faintly sheepish for having asked. Jesus. Tony doesn’t even know what he’s feeling anymore, he just doesn’t. Done.

“But seriously—that kid, _Steve_?”

“When he was littler.” Barnes shrugs. “I dunno.”

Tony slides the tablet aside and stares into the middle distance.

“Y’know, when I—talked him into coming, not gonna lie, that was on me, in my defense I had _no_ clue that fight would get that bad. I asked him why he was doing it. Literally fighting muggers in the streets, catching cars, like one of those old comics. And he said that when you can do the stuff that he can, but you don’t, and then the bad things happen, it’s on you.” Tony lets out a breath and tries not to fuss. Shit, if anything happened to Peter, he’d come back from the dead and get himself arrested just to rocket punch whatever did it. “So yeah, you’re…probably not wrong.”

“Okay, that sounds more like you,” Barnes says quietly, and Tony feels like his heart’s being yanked out of his chest and put back in upside-down. And he’s about the only person in the world for whom that isn’t metaphorical. He jerks his head up to stare at him; Barnes looks away. “Everything you try to do with Iron Man, I mean.”

“Shut the hell up you don’t even know me,” Tony breathes. It’s defensive, it’s his shittiest bitchy defensive, he can hear Pepper telling him that in the back of his head even as the words leave his lips, but nothing could have prepared him for James fucking Buchanan mom-strangling Barnes telling him that he’s a _hero_ , this was not an experience that he could be expected to tolerate with grace.

There’s a silence which stretches a little too long to be accidental before Barnes says, helpfully, “Uh.”

“Oh, _oh_ , fuck me, did we trade memories? That’s lovely, wish somebody would’ve warned me—”

“It’s not Wanda’s fault,” Barnes says, a little urgently. “She had—almost no control over any of that. Over how much you guys saw, and felt, and…what I felt from each of you. Just—impressions, really. My mind is…kind of a shithole.”

Tony just stares at him.

“Anyway, you’re.” Barnes’ jaw tightens a little, and black regret passes over his face like a shadow. “You’re a good guy.”

“What the fuck, Barnes, I tried to kill you.”

Barnes shrugs. “You’ve got a better reason than most.”

“I literally ripped your arm off.”

“Didn’t hurt.” Tony keeps staring at him—that, he’s pretty sure, is a bald-faced lie, at least as bald-faced as anything is from a guy who hasn’t shaved since 1945, given that he hadn’t managed to get back on his feet after taking that one. “As much as the last time,” he adds after a moment, brow furrowing. “You also literally just offered to _make_ me one.” Another pause. “Why are you arguing?”

It’s a little hesitant, more confused than anything, more genuine than any other time he’s been asked that question, and it’s a good thing, otherwise he’d’ve probably flipped his lid. Instead he stops, and tries to remember what Barnes actually knows about him, and scuds his chair around in a circle before licking his lips and jerking his chin up.

“Because if you add up everybody that’s died because I built something and didn’t care enough about the consequences, it makes your kill count look like kindergarten.” He jitters his knees. “That and Mr. Touchy Bald Guy went behind my back to make sure I designed weapons for Hydra for ten years, _that_ and I have a remarkable knack for fucking up everyone I care about, but that’s less. Quantifiable. Look, you don’t know me that well. I’m full of shit.” He snorts. “They say there’s a correlation between guilt and generosity.”

Barnes’ face crumples a little as he contemplates the last. “Maybe.” He fidgets slowly, takes a deep breath, lets it go. “You’re a good guy in my books and my standards are incredibly low, how’s that?”

Tony raise a finger. “Fair, I’m not Hydra on _purpose_. Okay, what aren’t you saying, cough it up.”

Barnes goes still as a rabbit in the grass, and after a long moment asks, very carefully, “If you think you’re responsible for the things you built, then…”

“…what does that say about Dad?” Tony grits out.

There’s a tic in Barnes’ jaw as he swallows, and nods.

“I dunno,” Tony says, fast and easy, then looks away. “You know, if I knew the answer to that, maybe I wouldn’t have needed to spend most of my adult life trying to get over it even when I thought it was just a dumb accident. When I got back from Afghanistan, when I shut down Stark Industries weapons production—” He rubs the bridge of his nose. “You probably don’t even know what I’m talking about, whatever, it’s on Youtube, look it up. 2008, my press conferences were hilarious. I wanted to talk with him about that shit. About the Manhattan Project, all the rest, as a…as a grown-up, as somebody who’d started to ask those questions. Took me damn well long enough to.” He stares into a corner of the lab, not quite looking back at Barnes because he doesn’t know what he’ll do if he does. “He was a shitty father, that doesn’t help. Look, I’ve never. I never knew him. Not really.”

“I’m sorry,” Barnes says quietly. Tony twitches and looks back up at him.

“Funny how you didn’t say that before,” he says, quiet and distinct.

Barnes shakes his head, hair falling into his face. “I didn’t mean. The other kind of sorry.” He takes a deep, steadying breath. “There’s…some things you can’t apologize for. They’re too big. If I could change it all, I would. But I can’t. So I just…gotta keep going, like you said in there.”

Tony almost wants to protest. _Demand_ an apology. But then he remembers the echoing dim concrete of Kresge’s backstage, the woman slamming a photograph against his chest. That there weren’t any words, because anything would’ve been hollow, ingratiating. “Sure,” he says. “I get you.”

Barnes is silent for a moment, and then, almost painfully earnest, says, “If there’s anything you need from me…”

“Besides my father back you son of a bitch?” Tony mumbles offhandedly, spinning his chair.

“I mean, you could build me a six-fingered hand, I guess,” Barnes says, voice _almost_ dead serious, “but it’d be the wrong one.”

Tony comes back around laughing, honest-to-god surprised. “Okay, seriously, you’ve _actually_ seen _The Princess Bride_? Welcome to this century.”

Barnes shrugs. “Being on the run for two years is actually pretty boring, and lots of people just throw out the cassette movies. I watched whatever.”

Tony holds up a finger, very intently, because this is important. “ _Star Wars_?”

“A bunch of ‘em, I dunno if I got them all. Not in anything like the proper order.”

“We can fix that, we have the technology, _Star Trek_?”

“Same. I liked the one with the whales.”

It hits Tony, a day late, like a ton of bricks, what Natasha might’ve meant. _Life goes on, so you live it_. He’s felt this guy have prosthetic installment surgery without anesthetic. Seen him murder children with his mind so torn-up that second thoughts couldn’t really occur to him. And freaking whale-saving is his favorite Trek movie. “If you are in fact better adjusted than Captain Wonderpants after two years, I’m gonna mock him a second time.”

Barnes actually cracks a smile at that one. Tony didn’t know he was _capable._ “Were those the same guys who did the one about the guy who was sort of accidentally Jesus?”

“Yeah, yeah yeah. _Life of Brian_ , god, that was formative. I was _way_ too young to see that when I saw it.”

Barnes snorts. “Sure, that’ll mess up a kid. I could hear Steve’s momma spinning in her grave all the way from Zagreb.”

“What, religious family?”

“Irish Catholic. I mean, everybody was something.”

Tony hesitates only a second. “Okay, no, here’s what I want, get back here, sit down.” It’s arguably downright sadistic, and he isn’t sure how much he cares; Barnes and Rogers are all that’s left. The only ones. Aunt Peggy’s gone, and it’s just them, and he still doesn’t… “Tell me about my dad.”

Barnes stops breathing for a moment, like he’s punched him, and slowly sinks down to sit cross-legged on the floor, a careful distance from Tony. “I didn’t…I don’t know how well I knew him.”

“Yeah, apparently he had that effect on people. I mean, I know he was a wild bachelor, genius, all that, tell me something I don’t know.”

Barnes lets out a shaky breath. “He was…loyal. Generous.” He’s quiet for a long moment, rummaging, and okay, probably not the person to go to for a coherent portrait, but Tony is _so_ not ready to ask Steve. “He kept trying to make stuff for us all, he had all these shields with gadgets and things that he kept waving at Steve, but Steve always liked just the one, he’s stubborn like that. New bombs, one guy loved all the new bombs he built, god help me I can’t remember his name.” It’s small, and a little helpless.

“Dernier?”

“Dernier. Yes.” Barnes takes a breath. “He built me this fancy new scope and rifle once, it was amazing for long-distance work. Gave me headaches, the zoom was so sharp. He was always coming up with stuff.”

Tony tries very hard _not_ to think about how familiar that sounds. “How gaga for Steve was he, really?”

Barnes looks downright confused for a moment. “He wasn’t…he was…proud of him, I guess? I mean, he made him, he was proud of anything he made that worked well. Other ’n that he was pretty normal around him, I think.”

Tony chews on that for a moment, bewildered. Had it been a posthumous thing? Guilt? “Was he ever hard on you guys?” he asks, trying to keep the bitterness out of his voice. Barnes looks even more confused.

“No, no, he thought we were all the cat’s pajamas. He was…really happy go lucky.” He’s silent for a moment. “I know…I think I remember…he was a self-made man. He’d never talk about the past or anything. If there was stuff going on under the surface, he hid it real good. One time, when he was drunk, he got maudlin on me…”

“I think I saw that.” Tony wiggles his fingers vaguely. “In your head. It’s…you know, it was kind of what I was thinking when I built Iron Man. Something different from a weapon that anyone could just pick up and use against the people I wanted to protect, sell behind my back, whatever.” He snorts. “I was naive enough back then that I didn’t even think of Iron Man as a weapon, not until Obie rubbed that in my face. But the problem is, if you make self-wielding weapons, one person can fuck up just as much as an institution can, and…”

“…they’re not people anymore,” Barnes says quietly.

“Yup.” Tony props his elbows on his knees, runs both hands through his hair. “And that’s why I gotta fix the Accords.”

“I should…let you work,” Barnes says. “I mean, if you don’t need…”

“No,” Tony sighs. “I’m good.” Not really. Best he could be. What the _hell_ is he supposed to do with all this? “Go, pet a cat, keep the fuzzy hellbeasts out of my hair.”

Barnes gives a breathy little sound that’s _almost_ a laugh. “Mission accepted.”

 

* * *

 

Tony builds the crappy plastic prosthetic. Okay, mostly plastic; there’s metal for the bones and some reinforcement for high-wear areas. It’s still high-quality, of _course_ , and designed to fit millimeter-snug over the stump—no surgery, just a latch to hold it on and a few thin channels laser-drilled through the nerveless metal to let fresh wires reach the contacts so Barnes can control it. It runs like a dream after only a few rounds of debugging, and Barnes says it’s got finer sensation than the last one, and now he can pick up a cat _and_ pet it at the same time, so he’s pretty much set.

Tony discovers that the Raft was a US military project that had been in the works since before the fall of SHIELD, which Ross had _generously_ volunteered as a holding area to help with enforcing the Accords. Ross had his grubby paws on it since the beginning, in fact, despite the fact that SHIELD had its own high-security containment—same place Blonsky had been until some mysterious transfer in the chaos after the fall. Ross had wanted his own facility separate from SHIELD, for his own agenda. Lovely as always. Tony decides he’d eat his tie if Blonsky _wasn’t_ on the raft, and eats lunch instead as he flags the sketchiest emails and passes the whole lot on to Natasha.

Tony speed-reads the rest of the Accords. Tony digs into the council members. Tony hacks and SWATs his way through the Watchdogs.

And then one scattering of Watchdog messages trickles across his radar, and everything else melts away into a black haze. Most of their internal communication isn’t by email—they’re just a little too smart for that, and seem to have a lot of in-person meetings—so he’s working off a spidernet of keylogging, digital voicemail, harder to trace things. But sometimes shreds come through. Shreds like this.

_1900 tomorrow. Let’s find out how much Stark’s bitch can regenerate._


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the missed week! Moving forward, I may wind up changing to an every-other-week schedule for RL life-balance reasons; I shall see how this week goes.

Getting the hell out of Wakanda, Tony discovers, is a lot harder when you can’t shrink to thumbnail size and hitch in somebody’s luggage. After some back and forth with one of T’Challa’s devastatingly gorgeous security people, Tony finds himself grudgingly granted an under-the-radar jet ride so he could go deal with his “urgent business.” And even a go-bag with cash and fake IDs. Natasha apparently made them for the whole team, like a super-spy soccer mom.

He’s somewhere over the Atlantic when he realizes that he isn’t _entirely_ sure what he’s planning to do. He just knows he can’t sit still anymore. Not for _this_. Not for these asswipes trying to hurt _Pepper_. And if he starts second-guessing himself, he’s going to drive himself crazy, and really, it’s fortunate that the white noise of the engines is oddly soothing after so many nights spent tossing and turning in the perfect sound-engineered silence of Wakanda’s big house.

He sleeps. He wakes, sweaty and shaken from nightmares of Pepper aflame, to be discretely discharged on a small airstrip outside of Los Angeles, with a number to call for pickup and directions to a safehouse that he’s guessing came from Natasha’s resources rather than T’Challa’s. And a text on his spyphone: _Got my tic-tacs. On my way to pick up your Halloween costume._

At least Natasha and Barton and Lang are safe. And his armor might actually be secure soon, thank fuck. He guesses from the code that he can’t reply openly, and they’re already en route north to Washington, and really, there’s not enough time.

Getting over to SI headquarters without raising flags feels like sneaking around in Tennessee, building fertilizer bombs in Miami. Like the old days, before every single goddamn thing he did had consequences. Except that’s bullshit, of course. He knows it’s bullshit. Always consequences. Unwanted nostalgia hits him like a truck as he slips across the parking lot that had been neatly paved over the crater left by an exploding arc reactor.

It’s been a while since he’s been down to HQ. Not long enough that he doesn’t know which back door to let himself in by. Cracking his _own_ security system is fun, easy street. He saunters down the plain hallway of the administrative wing, dredging up the layout from some corner of his memory. The cubemonkeys mostly go home at five. He needs to hit the back elevator up to the executive suite, dodge the R &D sectors—nobody sleeps up there. The fast way takes him past the locked stairwell down to the server room, and that—okay, that would count as a mistake. There’s one guy working late, rolled-up shirtsleeves, tablet under his elbow, latte cup in his hand, CAT5 tester on his belt. He freezes halfway through the door and stares at Tony.

“S…sir…?”

“Sshhh,” Tony whispers, holding a finger to his lips.

“You’re…you’re…”

“Dead. Very dead. You’re never going to try black blood of the earth again, you’re having caffeine hallucinations, there’s nobody here, go test my cables.”

The bewildered kid gives some jerk of his head and vanishes into the depths, and Tony breathes a prayer of thanks and skitters on down the hall.

 

* * *

  

The elevator coughs him out into the executive suite, fortunately abandoned, since Pepper hates to keep her staff working late if she can avoid it. Even when she’s usually in the office until eight, nine, even ten. Tony can feel his gut churning with nerves. Checks the time on his phone and seriously questions coming this far just for—what, just to see her? _Classy, Stark._

Then he rounds a corner to find the steel-gray bulk of War Machine filling the hallway, and he skids to a halt with an unwitting croak.

Rhodey’d been talking to Pepper, faceplate up, and the two of them turn, and that’s it, Tony’s caught.

Pepper lets out a whine of shock, face going slack, clamping one hand over her mouth. Staggers a step backwards, two. “Tony…?” she breathes.

There’s a tremor in Rhodey’s face, a tic in his jaw, and he takes a few quick shallow breaths and says, “Damn it, man, do you know how much paperwork I filled out for you?”

“Uh…sorry?” Tony ventures. “I’m here to—”

“Where have you been?” Rhodey asks.

“I, I probably shouldn’t tell you, safe, mostly, look—”

“Why didn’t you _tell_ us?” Rhodey barks. He looks almost—angry. Tony’s lost, he feels sick, aren’t they at least happy he’s alive—

“I didn’t know where to jump, it doesn’t matter—”

“ _Why._ ”

He can’t hardly look at him, and they don’t have time to talk, and something black and bloody that’s been building up in his belly since that day at the airport bursts. Just like that. “Because you’re better off without me!” Tony shouts, raw.

Pepper turns on her heel and hides her face from both of them with a moan.

“Jesus fucking Christ, _Tony_ ,” Rhodey snaps.

“What. It’s true.”

Rhodey spreads his arms wide with awhirr, voice rising. “Look at you. Tony _Stank_ , ladies and gentlemen, graduated MIT at seventeen, invented Iron Man, revolutionizing clean energy, supposedly like the smartest guy on the face of the earth, and cannot remember a simple fact that he’s been told only about seventy-six times. I. Don’t. Blame. You.”

“That doesn’t make it go away!” Tony barks, sudden and raw.

“Fine!” Rhodey barks back, marching closer, pace _almost_ natural in his armored shell. “Keep wallowing if you absolutely must, it’s one of your talents, but _you_ do not get to decide what I think! It’s bullheaded, and condescending, and stupid, and wrong.” One heavy stride with each word. “For fuck’s sake, Tones. I don’t want you to go run away and martyr yourself because you can’t deal with the fact that shit happens in combat.” His armored hands latch onto Tony’s shoulders, hard-edged and tight, repulsors hot through the thin fabric of his shirt. “I want my _friend back._ ”

Tony stares up at him, frozen for a moment, wide-eyed. Earthquakes. Pepper gathers herself and turns back around. Her gentle golf claps ring through the silence, and when he looks over to her, her eyes are red. She won’t need to job-hunt ever again, and it can’t even begin to be enough, but it’s all he could really give her, in the end. But her eyes are red, and his heart hurts.

“…that’s a thing I’ve been doing?” Tony mumbles eventually. “Yeah, okay, that’s a thing I’ve been doing.” He picks one of Rhodey’s hands off his shoulder, brow furrowing. “Sorry, I’m, I’m me, man your repulsors are running hot, have you been lubing your conduits…”

“Yes, Tones, I’ve been lubing my conduits, all night every night…” Jeez, Rhodey hasn’t dredged up _that_ old nickname in years, it’s making Tony’s heart do something funny, and he’s seriously considering hugging him, but that would be weird, right, and he’d probably get some gun poking into him because War Machine, and, and.

“That is a thing you’ve been doing and if I hadn’t recently publicly committed to nonviolence, I would absolutely throw something at you,” Pepper says, voice a little thin. “You’re not in the suit, I’d be nice and not throw a car.”

“Please don’t throw a car, think of the cars, okay, that’s. I’m sorry. I.” He’s babbling, he knows he’s babbling, he’s home and he’s missed them so much, and then his face is in Pepper’s shoulder, warm wool-silk blend against his beard, and she’s wrapping her arms around him, one hand splayed over his head, and he might, honest to god, be whimpering a little. Just once. Maybe.

“Christ,” Rhodey mutters. “What happened to you this time.” It’s not a question. Of course it’s not a question. Something always happens to him.

“Uh. Life?” Tony blurts. “Ross maybe wanted to dissect my brain and then I was in the Winter Soldier’s brain and there’s way too much brain going around and—”

“What?” Pepper yelps, and the shocked-and-bewildered Pepper voice is so gutwrenchingly familiar that he maybe makes another noise. “He—he tried to dissect your _brain_?”

“Obviously not successful? Except for the haircut, sorry, shaved is really—”

“—not your look,” Rhodey puts in, “sophomore year—”

“—please tell me you’ve thrown away those photos—”

“—are you kidding, not on my life—”

“Why are we not talking about the _Secretary of State_ trying to _dissect your brain_?” Pepper picks him out of her shoulder to clutch him by the jacket, radiating horrified concern, and Tony twists up something like an apologetic smile and shrugs.

“I told you he was sketchy?”

“That’s not just sketchy, that’s, that’s…” She stumbles to a halt, lost for words.

“Who put him in charge of enforcing the Accords?” Rhodey asks, business now, a sharp frown tugging at his mouth even as he still has one armored hand on Tony’s shoulder.

“You mean how corrupt is the council? I dunno, I know America’s diplomatic machine put forth his nomination and the sketchiness was obscured enough that the, uh, unsketchy contingent didn’t oppose it.” He realizes he hasn’t breathed in a bit, and stops to catch up. “There’s. Been a lot…”

Rhodey’s eyebrows lower as he sorts out the pieces. “You’ve had contact with Barnes. Rogers too?”

“Uh. I plead the fifth?”

“Sure, hell, the less I know about that, the better,” Rhodey mutters. “Is there anyone you’ve been working with that I’m _not_ supposed to arrest?”

“Urf. T’Challa? Do you still need to arrest Romanoff, she got a pardon for tasing the king of Wakanda…”

“She disappeared, so yes, but with a little less prejudice than the rest.”

“…any kill orders?” Tony asks in spite of himself, mouth a little dry.

“After that stunt he pulled at the UN? Barnes.”

“Your _brain_ ,” Pepper restarts, perfectly-manicured fingers barely touching his fuzzy scalp.

“Ross has been pretty clear that he wants Rogers and Maximoff and Lang alive, along with that Quake and any other noncompliant inhumans, others on discretion—”

Rhodey stops, and Tony feels his gut sinking, and they all share one silent, horrified stare as they realize what those names mean.

“Oh my god,” Pepper breathes. “S…so he can…”

“Take them apart and see how they tick?” Tony finishes. “Yeah, that’s a thing. Uh. The council is neither zero nor a hundred percent corrupt,” he puts forth a little belatedly. “I think T’Challa’s been trying to suss out whether it’s majority corrupt.”

“We have to take this to—who do we take this to?” Pepper asks.

Tony and Rhodey share a sinking glance.

“This _is_ the authority on people like us,” Rhodey says, “That was kind of the point.”

“You’re still a US citizen,” Pepper starts. “There must be something we can…” Her face crumples. “That’s why Ross released information on Ultron. _Fuck._ ” It’s tight-bitten, and pleading, and Pepper swears so rarely that Tony and Rhodey both jolt to attention.

“Yeah, I’m pretty well screwed, haven’t figured out what to do about that. Bigger problems. What _time_ is it, oh hell, Pepper, you’re in danger.”

Pepper gives him a weary look. “From who,” she says, not even making it a question.

“The Watchdogs, they leaked your registration to the press, they’re planning a strike at seven. Or at least rendezvousing at seven.”

Pepper checks her watch and rubs the bridge of her nose. “Well, it’s six forty-two and I have a very important conference call in three minutes. I’ll give them a raincheck and—can I ask you for a ride, Rhodey, is that legal?”

“Close enough for government work.” Rhodey looks almost grimly satisfied. “Bet they weren’t counting on War Machine. Do you have any details?”

“No, just that they’re coming here.”

“You _could_ have just called,” Pepper points out, to Tony’s humiliation, and marches over to the nearest intercom to punch in a code.

“I wanted to do,” he starts, and then stops. _When I see a situation pointed south…_ dear god, he’s as bad as Steve. A slow, rising alarm flares up from the speakers all along the hallway, and Pepper’s voice echoes out in split-second delay.

“All hands, this is Pepper Potts, calling for a complete evacuation of the complex. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill. Please remain calm and follow the standard evacuation procedure, using parking lot C as a rendezvous point. Any guests or contractors who have not received evacuation training, please be prepared to follow instructions. Upon checking in with the marshal, please feel free to leave for the night.”

“Tony,” Rhodey says, a little firmly, like he’s fussed he might have a panic attack or something. Tony shakes himself.

“No, I’m fine, I just. I seem to have a real hard time sitting things out, it’s embarrassing.”

“I’ll be right back,” Pepper puts in, already on her way to her office, and they mumble acknowledgement.

“Oversight doesn’t work unless you listen, you know,” Rhodey says, almost patiently, turning back to Tony. Tony blows out a long, long sigh, and leans against the wall, which is a mistake because there’s an alarm speaker right over his head.

“Well, I tried.” He unleans. “I want it to work, damn it. I know we need it, that’s not gonna change. But Ross is—”

“—a piece of work, sure—” Rhodey stops, a faint beeping from his helmet barely audible under the alarm. “Hang on, I should take this.” He half-turns, taps the side of his head. “Viz, what’s up?”

Tony can’t hear Vision on the other end, not clearly at least. Just a faint waft of British. An equally faint waft of Pepper from her cracked office door, where she’s standing behind her desk, back to the door, because Stark conference phones are the best conference phones and can pick you up even when you’re talking in the floor-to-ceiling view. Tony goes to lean near the door instead, watching her silhouetted against the late light of the day, sun catching her hair like fire.

“No, I haven’t gotten anything, it’s my day off,” Rhodey’s saying. “Guess they think you can handle it alone.” More British. “I’m down at Stark HQ, getting a tuneup, seeing Pepper, the usual.”

“Who is this?” Pepper’s saying. Tony can barely hear her, but he _feels_ the edge in her voice more than anything, the unease that stiffens her spine. Rhodey’s pacing a little behind him as he talks.

“Just as well. I may have a terror threat to deal with here.” British, British. “Nah, hopped-up gun junkies, nothing War Machine can’t handle. Besides, you’ve got your own mission.”

“I’m aware,” Pepper’s saying, voice flat in that way she gets when she’s absolutely furious, and Tony fishes his spyphone out of his pocket and slips through the door, because maybe he can trace the call—

Two round holes punch themselves in the glorious sunset view, and two grenades roll onto the floor. One of them’s hissing, gas rising. The other rolls between Pepper’s feet, and doesn’t hiss at all, which means—

“Pepper!” Tony yells, and pulls his shirt up over his nose, and runs for her.

Steve Rogers crashes feet-first through the window in one thunderous streak of commando black, shoves Pepper out of the way, and kicks the grenade back out through the glass. It explodes before it even touches the ground, close enough that whatever’s left of the glass rains down and Tony’s ears ring.

Gas washes over Pepper and Steve both, and there’s a round of absolutely wretched coughing. Tony clamps his hand over his mouth and nose and gives that grenade his best soccer kick. It slides, falls, down and out, still spewing.

At least, Tony thinks distantly, parking lot C is on the other side of the building.

The shit that’s still in the air is stinging his eyes, and he’s going to have to breathe in entirely too little time. Steve’s doubled over wheezing, and that’s not a good sign for mere mortals. Pepper braces herself against the desk, stunned, and when she looks over her shoulder at Tony, he can see her throat glowing softly as she heals, the sheen of fell red in her eyes.

A blast of wind hits Tony’s back, so strong that he staggers, and the rest of the gas bleeds away. He turns to see Rhodey standing in the doorway with his faceplate down, left arm raised.

“Didn’t know you had a power fan attachment,” Tony pants, letting go of his nose.

“And now you know why.” Rhodey tromps in. Steve shudders, forces in air, forces himself upright, and dives right back out the window. No, swings, at least he goes up and not down. Rhodey’s sigh is tinny through War Machine’s speakers. “Gonna go find whoever fired those, they can’t be far,” he says, and dives out the window with a flare of repulsors.

“Pepper,” Tony blurts, pulling his shirt back down and closing the distance.

“Was that,” she starts weakly. Her hand’s drifting over her cooling throat, the light of Extremis fading, and she sounds perfectly normal.

“Any idea who was on the phone?”

She draws herself up. “No, they were using a voice changer. Just a typical death threat. But it’s ten minutes to—”

“I don’t know, shit, did something tip them off…”

Rhodey floats back up, glinting gunmetal in the sunset, and drops two unconscious men in camo tac gear on the floor. “Tony, if you ever figure out how to build a stun baton that doesn’t fry comms, let me know, I’d love to listen in on these losers.”

“You didn’t see any others?”

“They’re gone to ground. I’m guessing trucks or the old underground sectors.” He pops his faceplate up with a sigh. “You didn’t tell me Cap was _with_ you.”

“I didn’t _know_ , give me some credit. I think he’s stalking me.” Tony pulls out his spyphone and starts trying to crack their channel. His eyes are still burning; he goes to rub them, and Rhodey swats his wrist out of the way.

“That’ll make it worse, didn’t you learn anything freshman year? Pepper, I need to get you out of here.”

“Not until the evacuation’s complete,” Pepper says, chin up. “But if they had access to my full registration, they have some idea of what I can survive…”

Tony’s phone rings.

He jolts, takes the call. “You’d better be who I think you are.”

“ _Technically I’m Redwing,_ ” Wilson says. “ _Smile, you’re on our channel._ ”

Right, he’d built comm-routing into Redwing on a lark. “Hey, honey,” Tony chirps, entirely too smug. “I knew that would come in handy.”

Pepper stares at him with weary bewilderment. “Tony, are you dating again.” She doesn’t sound remotely angry, at least?

“Only a robot bird.”

“Naturally,” Rhodey snorts.

“ _Tony, what the hell is going on_?” That, he’s guessing, is Steve; he sounds like he’s deep-throated a cheese grater, he’s barely recognizable, but he’s moving and talking. Fine by Avengers standards.

“Grenades probably a warm-up act,” Tony says into the phone, because Pepper’s right, she wasn’t exactly in danger from that little. “Target’s Pepper. Highly armed and paramilitary trained anti-enhanced hate group.” He swallows. “Rhodey’s with me. Look—”

Rhodey plucks the phone out of his hand, delicate between armored fingers. “I’m a US military counterterrorism specialist reporting directly to the president, and as long as there’s an imminent threat, my responsibilities to the UN council take second seat to that. I appreciate you helping Pepper. Don’t push your luck.” He hands the phone back to Tony before any of them can even respond—probably for his own plausible deniability.

“Who’s with you, what’s Redwing picking up?” Tony asks in a rush.

“ _Steve tried to take off, me and this caveman followed him,_ ” Wilson says. “ _Redwing hasn’t spotted any hostiles yet, but it’s a damn big place for a blind scan._ ”

“ _Steve’s the caveman_ ,” comes Barnes’ voice over the line, and Tony feels his gut twist a little, because okay, who else would count as a caveman, but he didn’t want that to be the answer. “ _My tenement had windows, thank you._ ”

“There’s no squad moving in, when’s the next shoe gonna drop—if I’ve raised this much fuss for a warning shot, this’ll be embarrassing.” He palm-covers the phone and drops his voice. “Jeez, Buckaroo Banzai.” He can hear Wilson snort over the line. “Ross has a kill order on you, you know.”

“ _What’s new,_ ” Barnes sighs.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“ _I guess I’m still bad at letting Steve run off,_ ” Barnes says, voice quiet.

“I feel you,” Tony mutters, more to himself than to him. Guess that really is a prime qualification for getting involved in this shit. Never letting things be.

“ _What am I, then?_ ” Wilson says.

“Boys, boys, you’re both pretty…”

“ _I’ll sweep down—Bucky, can you get to the bottom and work up?_ ” That’s Steve, sounding only slightly less awful now.

“ _Sure,_ ” Barnes drawls, “ _I’ll jump down an elevator shaft for a guy who sounds like Chewbacca._ ” Tony can hear them starting to move out. “ _Sam, how much of that shit did he breathe?_ ”

“ _Enough to slow him down, not enough to do serious damage._ Remember _that it’s slowing you down, you big lug._ ”

There’s some alarming rush of background noise which Tony can only assume is Barnes jumping down an elevator shaft. And then there’s a distant crash and rumble, and a new set of alarms joins the first. Pepper twitches, looks around wide-eyed.

“ _Incoming_ ,” Wilson says.

“ _Moving to intercept,_ ” Steve grates out. There’s some general background scramble for a few moments, and Rhodey bares his teeth, standing protectively near Pepper.

“ _Ordinance_ ,” Barnes says over the comms, sudden and oddly calm, and Tony can hear Steve and Wilson both hissing in alarm. “ _Military grade C4, west foundation, enough to take down the side of the building—_ ”

Tony jolts into motion, pelting down the hall to the elevator. _This_ side of the building. “Shit, where, let me get down there—”

“ _But it doesn’t need disarming. The detonator’s gone. Shattered._ ”

Tony skids to a stop, eyes narrowing. “Shattered like how?”

“ _I…don’t know._ ” Some of the urgency’s drained out of his voice, and Tony can hear vague rustles, as if he’s investigating. “ _It’s just dust. Not even any real fragments._ ”

“Guess that was _supposed_ to be the other shoe,” Tony says slowly. Not mere strength, then, or any sort of impact, at least not one that wouldn’t set off the plastic explosive along with it. Who else would even know about it, anyway? Did one of the dogs sabotage it, think better of blowing up a civilian building full of innocent R &D guys and one server tech working late? “Wilson, are you teaching Redwing new tricks?”

“ _Man, I’m cool, but I’m not that cool._ ”

Pepper clicks up behind him, Rhodey in tow. “Tony, what’s wrong?”

“There was a bomb in the basement, but somebody else disarmed it somehow—”

“In an occupied civilian building?” Pepper gasps. “I only knew to evacuate because of you, that would’ve killed…oh, Christ.” She shoves her fingers through her bangs with one hand, checks her phone with the other, and Tony can see her last shreds of hesitation falling away. Because that’s how she always is at times like this, stammering and scared until she kicks into gear and _shines_. “Rhodey, they should be almost done with the evacuation, but _please_ , get down there and protect them.”

“Pep—”

“I’m _very_ hard to kill these days,” she snaps. “And they can’t drop a building on me anymore, and I’m _never_ going to let anyone hurt Tony. _Go._ I can’t take action, Captain Rogers can’t be seen. You can.”

Rhodey snaps down the faceplate. And goes. Pepper doesn’t even flinch in his wake.

“The police will be here in ten minutes,” she says, turning to Tony, who’s a little too busy being desperately in love to talk back. “I’ll need to talk with them

“Yeah, let me—”

“ _Shit_ ,” Wilson snaps. “ _Cavemen, we’ve got SWAT vans coming round the corner_.”

“—they’re already here,” Tony finishes, feeling his heart speed up.

“That’s not possible,” Pepper says.

“Wilson has eyes on the roof, he—”

“No,” says Pepper, firm as iron without even raising her voice. “I know the response times. That’s not possible.”

“Wait, you’re saying…”

Pepper’s phone vibrates in her hand, and she looks at it. And freezes, eyes widening. “Tony,” she breathes after a moment. “Is there any way these Watchdogs know about Section 26?”

Tony feels ice in his veins. Section 26. The lockbox. “I don’t know, but Romanoff and I thought Ross might have a mole in here. Is it—”

“Silent alarm. It’s compromised.” Pepper turns on a stiletto heel, starts marching towards the elevator. Tony skitters after her for a few paces, falls into step. “A _mole_? You should have called me.”

“Mea culpa, next time, I’m a work in progress.” It falls from his lips easy as anything, because she taught him humility along with everything else. “Wilson, please tell me you’re off the roof,” he says into his phone.

“ _Sure_ ,” Wilson says. “ _We’ve got unknown numbers of dogs, probably in the lowest levels, and the cops will breach the ground floor any minute now…_ ”

“ _How many parties are in play right now, exactly?_ ” Steve rasps.

“ _Чёрт его знает,_ ” Barnes mutters, and then there’s a rattle of gunfire in the background. “ _Yup, dogs in the subbasement_ ,” he adds, sounding more resigned than anything else.

“ _How many, Buck?_ ” Steve croaks, wherever he is. Pepper calls the elevator, and it’s still right there from Tony riding it up, and the chime as the doors slide open blends right in to the scuffle of combat.

“ _Four. I’m guessing they’re in small teams to sweep._ ” Barnes’ words are broken up with grunts, punches, gunshots. Pepper hits the button for the lowest level, and they start sinking with a hum, and Tony reaches for her free hand with his. He doesn’t even realize it until their fingers tangle, each holding their phones with their other hands, Tony’s leaking noise. “ _Many small teams_ ,” Barnes grunts. “ _I’m gonna—”_

There’s a terrible shriek of feedback over Tony’s phone, loud enough that even Pepper winces and turns to stare. “What—”

“ _Who the hell,_ ” Barnes blurts, and then there’s a second burst of noise, a horrible ringing blast like the world is shaking apart, and one wretched groan from Barnes.

And his line goes dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Russian of the day: Bucky near the end says Чёрт его знает: "fuck if I know," or, literally, "the devil knows."


End file.
